Enrique Fernández-Macías

Job Polarization in Europe? Changes in the Employment Structure and Job Quality, 1995-2007

In recent years, a number of academic papers have argued that over the last couple of decades, technical change has had a polarizing impact on the employment structure of advanced capitalist economies with a relative expansion of jobs occupying the top and bottom of the wage/skills hierarchy and the middle shrinking. In this article, we present alternative evidence on the nature of change in European employment structures between 1995 and 2007, arguing that rather than a pervasive process of polarization there was a plurality of patterns of structural employment change across Europe. The broader theoretical implications of such findings are discussed.

Measuring More than Money

Job quality is a crucial link between the economy and well-being. This original book proves that it can and should be measured, proposing a theoretically based multidimensional ‘Index of Job Quality’ that is tested in the EU member States. The index proves particularly useful to measure the differences in job quality by country, occupation, gender and age.

Supplementary private pensions and saving: evidence from Spain*

This paper analyzes the effect of private supplementary pensions (and the tax reliefs that aim to stimulate such plans) on national saving in Spain. It tries to test the alleged positive effects of private pension plans on savings. Using a longitudinal dataset and fixed-effects methods, we find that tax-favored contributions to a pension fund are not associated with a lower consumption level, which implies that this policy does not increase national saving. The empirical results on the impact of contributions on private household wealth are less clear.

Assessing Recent Employment Shifts in Europe Using a Multidimensional Job Quality Indicator

The main aim of this chapter is to enrich our analysis of changes of the employment structure in the EU during 1998–2007 by developing a new broad-based job quality measure to view those changes. Specifically, we formulate a multidimensional measure of job amenities1 based on non-pecuniary job dimensions which derives from the sociological literature on job quality. We then operationalize this measure by matching survey items from the Fourth European Working Conditions survey (2005) data set to the job amenity dimensions identified in order to generate a job quality value at individual respondent level. This allows us to extend the jobs project analysis in new directions using a richer indicator of job quality measured at the individual as well as the job level.

The Construction of a European Job Quality Index

1. The index should be based on a clear defi nition of job quality, and the elements included in the index should not go beyond the boundaries of such concept. We use the operational defi nition proposed earlier (see Chapter 1): job quality refers to the characteristics of jobs that have a direct impact on the wellbeing of workers. Such broad defi nition restricts considerably the type of information that a multidimensional job quality index should summarize: it should be restricted to information about the attributes of jobs, not of the workers that hold them (even if the information is reported by the workers themselves); it should not include contextual information (on institutional settings, unemployment levels, etc); and it should refer to results rather than procedures (unless such procedures have themselves a direct impact on the wellbeing of workers). 2. The selection of attributes to be measured, and the principles used for aggregating the information, should be based on a properly justifi ed theoretical model. For this purpose, we draw from the literature review carried out in Chapter 2: our model of job quality has fi ve dimensions that broadly correspond to the fi ve main traditions of study of job quality (or the impact of job attributes on the wellbeing of workers) in the Social Sciences. There is only one broad area of job quality reviewed in the previous chapter but not included in the model (because unfortunately the EWCS does not cover it): participation and industrial democracy.1 3. The index should be calculated at the individual level in order to allow analysing the situation of specifi c groups of workers. The data used should be highly harmonized across countries to make the results