Documents Gielen, Anne C. 6 results

"The Dutch labour market is the European leader in part-time employment. Both for men and women the incidence of part-time work is higher than in most other European countries. However, this does not imply that traditional employment – i.e. full-time jobs – have disappeared in the Netherlands. In fact, looking at aggregate figures masks the enormous heterogeneity in the incidence of atypical work across different occupations. This paper investigates trends in atypical work in the Netherlands in the period 1994-2008, where specific attention has been paid to differential trends across different occupations over time. We find that there is a huge amount of variety in atypical work across Dutch occupations. To a certain extent this matches the preferences of employees and employers in the Dutch labour market. However, some workers – in particular low-skilled workers – suffer from job insecurity and a lack of career prospects due to their limited possibilities to move to better jobs. The current economic crisis and the rising unemployment rate make their situation even more uncertain."

"Job protection reduces job turnover by changing firms' hiring and firing decisions. Yet the effect of job protection on workers' quit decisions and post-quit outcomes is still unknown. We present the first evidence using individual panel data from 12 European countries, which differ both in worker turnover rates and in the level of job protection. We find that workers are less likely to quit their job in countries with more job protection, and those workers who quit receive higher wages compared to stayers. This evidence can be explained by increased mobility costs associated with higher expected risk of post-quit layoff and job mismatch."

"This article investigates whether paying a profit-related wage stimulates training investments. The results point to increased worker effort and wage flexibility as two channels through which profit sharing enhances investments in training. While both effects are found for young workers, for older workers, profit sharing mainly affects training investments through greater worker effort. The results suggest that profit sharing can be especially useful for stimulating training among older workers, a growing group in the labour force with a relatively weak labour market position due to a lack of training."

"It is puzzling that people feel quite unhappy when they become unemployed, while at the same time active labor market policies are needed to bring unemployed back to work more quickly. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we investigate whether there is indeed such a puzzle. First, we find that nearly half of the unemployed do not experience a drop in happiness, which might explain why at least some workers need to be activated. In addition to that, we find that even though unemployed who experience a drop in happiness search more actively for a job, it does not speed up their job finding. Apparently, there is no link between unhappiness and the speed of job finding. Hence, there is no contradiction between unemployed being unhappy and the need for activation policies."

"Job protection reduces job turnover by changing firms' hiring and firing decisions. Yet the effect of job protection on workers' quit decisions and post-quit outcomes is still unknown. We present the first evidence using individual panel data from 12 European countries, which differ both in worker turnover rates and in the level of job protection. We find that workers are less likely to quit their job in countries with more job protection, but conditional on quitting they receive higher wages. This evidence can be explained by increased mobility costs associated with higher expected risk of post-quit layoff and job mismatch."

"This paper studies the presence of hours constraints on the UK labor market and its effect on older workers labor supply, both at the extensive and the intensive margin. Using panel data for the period 1991-2004, the results from a competing risks model show that over-employed male workers can freely reduce working hours with their current employer before retiring completely. However, some over-employed women are observed to leave the labor market early due to hours constraints. Despite the fact that more flexibility in hours may increase labor market participation of older women, this paper presents some explorative results which illustrate that increasing working hours flexibility does not seem to increase older workers total labor supply as has often been suggested."