Documents Fabo, Brian 14 results

"As a result of technological progress and economic change, many new occupations have emerged in the labour market, while others have become redundant and disappeared. Along with these new and emerging occupations, new skills have been introduced that can be developed through formal education, on-the-job training or learning-by-doing (or in some other way). This paper presents the Occupations Observatory, which we have created with the aim of providing up-to-date information on these changes in the labour market – reflected in the rise of new occupations and their corresponding skill changes – to policy-makers, researchers, educational institutes, job seekers and many other stakeholders (and how occupational dynamics feed into the occupational classification schemes). We focus not only on new occupations that did not exist before but also on new occupations in terms of recognition, awareness and importance.



This paper was written within the framework of the InGRID project. Funded by the European Union's 7th Framework Programme for Research, the InGRID project (Inclusive Growth Research Infrastructure Diffusion) involves 17 European partners, including CEPS. It aims to integrate and innovate existing, but distributed European social sciences research infrastructures on ‘Poverty and Living Conditions' and ‘Working Conditions and Vulnerability' by providing transnational data access, organising mutual knowledge exchange activities and improving methods and tools for comparative research."

"This policy brief considers the impact of online platforms on labour markets and on the employment relationship in particular. It discusses the importance of outsourcing platforms, arguing that the ‘collaborative economy' used by the European Commission (EC) is a misleading concept, as the trend is in fact just an extension of the market mechanism. The authors also propose concrete policies that would address the risks related to platform-mediated work."

"This case study provides a snapshot of the dynamics in the digital market for locally provided personal services. Based on a case study for a Belgium platform with 14,113 identified workers and 9,459 posted tasks, the findings suggest that the current intermediation is inefficient. Only a limited share of the tasks posted on the platform are being completed, whereas the characteristics of the not-completed tasks are fairly limited. Moreover, just a small share of the workers participating in the platform is actually performing the completed tasks. Their average earnings per hour are in most cases above the minimum wage and even above the median wage in the offline market. At the present time, however, the limited earnings for individual workers prevent this mode of working from becoming an alternative to a conventional job. In addition to the standard determinants of workers' earnings (e.g. gender, age, occupation, etc.), the characteristics and evaluation mechanism of the platform have a large influence on the distribution of tasks and earnings."

"Recent organisational and technological changes have generated a digital class of workers and contractors – in effect a new labour-market fringe. In this paper the authors take the case of an Italian crowdsourcing platform for interior design, called CoContest, to examine whether this medium is profitable and why professionals would choose to supply their work via such a platform.

The authors' analysis shows that despite the low returns on crowdsourced design work, a straightforward pattern of northern employer/southern contractor is not represented here because designers supply their work even if they live in Italy, which is a high-income country. For these designers CoContest can make sense if they are new to the labour market and face high entry barriers, although crowdsourcing does not offer them profitable full-time employment. The case of Serbia, however, which is the second-largest supplier of designers on the platform, is interesting in this regard. As a result of differences in purchasing power, experienced Serbian designers can make a living from crowdsourced contracts, assuming that the market continues to grow."

"This article studies the migration response of young people from new EU Member States to disparate conditions in an enlarged European Union at the onset of the Great Recession. We use Eurobarometer data and probabilistic econometric models to identify the key drivers of the intention to work in another Member State of the European Economic Area (EEA) and the expected duration of stays abroad. We find that migration intentions are high among those not married and among males with children, but both categories are also over-represented among people with only temporary as opposed to long-term or permanent migration plans. Whereas age affects migration intentions negatively, education has no effect on whether working abroad is envisaged. However, conditional on envisaging working abroad, completion of education (if after the 16th birthday) is associated with long-term (at least five years), but not permanent, migration plans. These results suggest a potential for brain circulation rather than brain drain. Finally, we find that socio-demographic variables explain about as much variation of migration intentions as self-reported push and pull factors and migration constraints. "

"This paper studies the migration response of the youth from new EU member states to disparate conditions in an enlarged European Union at the onset of the Great Recession. We use the Eurobarometer data and probabilistic econometric models to identify the key drivers of the intention to work in another member state of European Economic Area (EEA) and their expected duration. We find that migration intentions are high among those not married and among males with children, but both categories are also overrepresented among people with only temporary as opposed to long-term or permanent migration plans. Whereas age affects migration intentions negatively, education has no effect on whether working abroad is envisaged. However, conditional on envisaging to work abroad, completion of education (if after 16th birthday) is associated with long-term (at least five years), but not permanent, migration plans. Finally, we find that socio-demographic variables explain about as much variation of migration intentions as self-reported push and pull factors and migration constraints."

"This article contributes to the debate on labour platforms (e.g. TaskRabbit, CoContest, ListMinut) by analysing the potential of such platforms. Although we see potential in online platforms in terms of job creation and providing opportunities to discouraged and disadvantaged people, we also address some of the challenges related to such work. Presenting empirical data, we argue that the current labour market and working conditions created by online platforms resemble 19th century laissez-faire. We thus call for the urgent creation of a regulatory framework taking into consideration the suggestions presented in our article. "

"Minimum wage is one of the most debated issues in the labour policy area. Often perceived as a trade-off between employment and equality in earnings, the debate on minimum wage is highly polarized. With regard to the undergoing discussions on the Social Pillar of the European integration, we aim to extend the debate to include the aspect of minimum living standards, by empirically showing the gap between minimum wages and the minimum living wages in the peripheral countries of the European Union."