Documents Künn-Nelen, Annemarie 2 results

With this article, the authors are the first to analyze and explain the relationship between part-time employment and firm productivity. Using a unique data set on the Dutch pharmacy sector that includes the working hours of all employees and a "hard" physical measure of firm productivity, the authors estimate a production function including heterogeneous employment shares based on working hours. The authors find that firms with a large part-time employment share are more productive than firms with a large share of fulltime workers: a 10% increase in the part-time share is associated with 4.8% higher productivity. Additional data on the timing of labor demand show that this can be explained by a different allocation of part-timers compared with full-timers. This enables firms with large part-time employment shares to allocate their labor force more efficiently across working days.

"Various studies have shown that temporary workers participate less in training than those on permanent contracts. This paper investigates whether there is a difference in employer willingness to provide training to temporary vs. permanent workers and estimates the size of these differences under different cost-benefit related conditions. Building on a theoretical framework for employers' provision of training that includes the major potential sources of cost-benefit differences associated with training investments in employees with different types of employment contracts, we use a discrete choice experiment to estimate the elasticity of a training offer to three attributes affecting employers' expected net benefits from training investments: (1) the transferability of the skills being trained, (2) the financial contribution of the employee to the training costs and (3) the repayment of training costs when the employee quits early. We find that the effect of the transferability of the training is small and not robust to alternative model specifications. Instead, employers' lower likelihood of investing in temporary workers is affected by two attributes: a financial contribution to the training costs and a repayment of training costs in case of early quits. Employers' willingness to invest in temporary workers will particularly increase when introducing a contract clause that workers will repay their training costs when they quit within a year after the training."