We review some lessons from the Spanish experience of using temporary employment contracts for regular jobs since 1984. The focus is on the role of fixed-term contracts with low severance pay, which have substituted for reform of employment protection legislation for permanent contracts. We consider the main findings about this reform on the Spanish labour market in the light of the main theoretical implications derived from models dealing with dual labour markets, and address why the incidence of temporary work has remained highly persistent, around 33% of salaried employment, in the 1990s, despite several reforms aimed at reducing it.If one looks for a country to test for the different effects of temporary work contracts on the labour market, Spain provides a fascinating case study. Up to the early 1980s, permanent work contracts open ended contracts subject to man datory severance payments represented more than 90% of all contracts, with the remaining temporary contracts being mainly of seasonal nature which employers could only use to hire workers performing non regular productive activities, for example, in agriculture or in the tourist industry. In 1984, with the unemploy ment rate at 20.1%, the Spanish government tried to implement a significant change in Employment Protection Legislation (EPL) by liberalising temporary contracts in two main respects: first, their use was extended to hire employees performing regular activities; and, second, they entailed much lower dismissal costs than the regular permanent contracts. As a result, the proportion of tem porary employees in total (salaried) employment surged in the second half of the 1980s, staying above 30% since 1990 (Fig. 1). A clear sign that employers took full advantage of the newly available flexibility device is that a large fraction of tem porary workers have been hired under fixed term contracts while other types of temporary contracts (probationary, seasonal, etc.), which are more representative in other European labour markets, have remained relatively unimportant (Fig. 2).During the 1990s, despite a series of countervailing labour market reforms in 1994, 1997 and, more recently, in 2001, which provided a less stringent EPL for permanent contracts and considerable restrictions for the use of fixed term contracts, the share of temporary employees has only marginally declined from 35.4% in 1995 to 32.0% in 2001. Over this period, more than 90% of new hires have been signed under temporary contracts, and the duration of employment spells has very much decreased. Thus, in just a decade, a fairly regulated labour * We are grateful to Alison Booth, Ignacio Conde, Jeff Frank, Miguel A. Malo, Barbara Petrongolo, Donald Storrie, Luis Toharia, participants in seminars at Amsterdam, Bocconi, Essex, Montreal and Southampton universities, three anonymous referees and an editor, for very helpful comments and suggestions. Special thanks to Virginia Hernánz and Mario Izquierdo for their research assistance, and to Luis Sauto for providing us with the data abou...

Using work-history data from the British Household Panel Survey, the authors examine job mobility and job tenure over the period 1915-90. British men and women held an average of five jobs over the course of their work lives, and half of all lifetime job changes occurred in the first ten years. Separation hazards were higher for more recent cohorts, implying an increase in job instability. As jobs accumulated, average tenure lengthened, but the proportion of involuntary separations increased. For both men and women, the rise in job instability was particularly marked in the lowest occupational classification. In general, job insecurity was greater for men than women.A ccording to work history data from the CL. British Household Panel Survey, men and women in Britain hold, on average, a total of five jobs during their lifetimes, and half of all lifetime job changes occur in the first ten years. Are there gender differences in these patterns of job tenure, and does the reason for termination of a job

Using data from the European Community Household Panel on six countries over the period 1995-2001, this article investigates the determinants of workers' participation in training activities and the effects of training on wages. Based on measures of four distinct training types, the authors find that while OLS estimates yield significant wage returns to training for nearly all of the countries, fixed-effects estimations show returns to be not statistically different from zero. This suggests that wage returns to training might be overstated due to failure to take adequate account of the correlation of training with confounding factors that affect wages. he profound technological change that industrialized countries have under-

This paper analyses the relationship between workers’ type of contract and the probability of receiving firm-provided training. In particular, we raise the following question: do workers with temporary contracts face the same probability of receiving training as workers with permanent contracts, once we account for the fact that both types of workers have different probabilities of being employed in a firm providing training? The results from our empirical analysis using data from the Spanish labour market suggest that workers with temporary contracts not only are less likely to be employed in training firms but, once they are in those firms, they also have a lower probability of being chosen to participate in firm-provided training activities. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin/Heidelberg 2004Temporary contracts, firm-provided training,

No abstract

This article uses data from a nationwide survey of Spanish workers to investigate whether job satisfaction is influenced by unionization when the terms of collective agreements are extended to all the workers, whether members or not. Empirical findings suggest that there is a negative influence of union membership on job satisfaction and a positive one for collective agreements at firm level, but these effects vanish once variables capturing working conditions and the industrial relations climate are taken into account.

We provide the first Spanish evidence about the effects on re‐employment probabilities of variations in benefit levels and time‐to‐exhaustion. Increases in unemployment insurance (UI) benefit levels had a small disincentive effect on the re‐employment hazard on average. Around this average, there were larger disincentive effects for men with elapsed durations between 4 and 18 months, whereas for men unemployed longer than 18 months, or for men resident in the south, the effect was negligible. Re‐employment hazards increased when UI exhaustion was imminent, but the change was small. Extensions to unemployment assistance eligibility in 1989 for men aged 45+ years lowered re‐employment probabilities.

Unemployment exits, Temporary employment, Competing risks model, Unobserved heterogeneity, J64, J65,