Juan F. Jimeno

Drawing Lessons from the Boom of Temporary Jobs in Spain

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.

Regional unemployment persistence (Spain, 1976–1994)

This paper examines the degree of persistence of regional relative unemployment. A theoretical model is built to explain the role of migration, labour-force participation, and real wage flexibility at the regional level, in determining such persistence. The model is used to account for the observed degree of persistence of regional relative unemployment in Spain, as compared to the US and the EU, also providing new estimates on real wage flexibility in Spanish regions.

The effects of employment protection: Learning from variable enforcement

Employment protection legislations (EPL) are not enforced uniformly across the board. There are a number of exemptions to the coverage of these provisions: firms below a given threshold scale and workers with temporary contracts are not subject to the most restrictive provisions. This within-country variation in enforcement allows making inferences on the impact of EPL that go beyond the usual cross-country approach. In this Paper we develop a simple model that explains why these exemptions are in place to start with. Then we empirically assess the effects of EPL on dismissal probabilities, based on a double-difference approach. Our results are in line with the predictions of the theoretical model. Workers in firms exempted from EPL are more likely to be laid-off. We do not observe this effect in the case of temporary workers.(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

The causes of Spanish unemployment: A structural VAR approach

Abstract In this paper, we review the main causes of Spanish unemployment and weight them by estimating a simple macroeconomic model using the structural VAR methodology. By using this methodology we associate different causes of unemployment with shocks of different nature which have long-lasting effects due to full hysteresis. We claim that such an extreme assumption on ‘state dependency’ is reasonable, at least as a local approximation, for the period and the economy at hand. Our results suggest that the combination of a plausible mixture of different types of shock and extreme persistence in their propagation mechanisms can satisfactorily explain the dismal performance of the Spanish labour market during the last two decades.

On-the-Job Search in a Matching Model with Heterogeneous Jobs and Workers

This paper considers a matching model with heterogeneous jobs (unskilled and skilled) and workers (low- and high-educated) which allows for on-the-job search by mismatched workers. The latter are high-educated workers who transitorily accept unskilled jobs and continue to search for skilled jobs. Our findings show that on-the-job search introduces an additional source of between- and within-group wage inequality. Furthermore, the higher quit rate of mismatched workers exerts a negative externality on unskilled jobs and weakens the labour market position of low-educated workers. This last feature changes the effects of skill-biased technological change and it alters the response of the labour market to shifts in the skill distribution.

Reforming an Insider-Outsider Labor Market: The Spanish Experience

This paper presents a case study on reforming a very dysfunctional labor market with a deep insider-outsider divide, namely the Spanish case. We show how a dual market, with permanent and temporary employees, makes real reform much harder, and leads to purely marginal changes that do not alter the fundamental features of labour market institutions. While the Great Recession and the start of the sovereign debt crisis have lately triggered two labor reforms, the political economy equilibrium has not allowed them to be transformational enough.JEL codesH29; J23; J38; J41; J64

Modelling the impact of aging on social security expenditures

In this paper we survey the features of different approaches available in the literature used to study the effects of the aging of the population on Social Security expenditures. We comment on the weaknesses and strengths of each of them, and perform a quantitative analysis by comparing the results they imply in the particular case of the Spanish economy. Finally, we highlight some elements of the modelling strategies on which more evidence is needed for a correct evaluation of the problem at hand.

The Effect Of Immigration On The Employment Opportunities Of Native-Born Workers: Some Evidence For Spain

Spain is one of the European countries where immigration flows during the last decade have increased noticeably. The Spanish labor market institutions and the Spanish immigration policy exhibit some peculiarities which may be relevant when analyzing the impact of immigration. This paper provides a first approximation to the labor market effects of immigrants in Spain during the second half of the 1990s, the period in which immigration flows to Spain have accelerated. By using alternative datasets, we estimate both the impact of legal and total immigration flows on the employment rates of native workers, accounting for the possible occupationa l and geographical mobility of immigrants and native-born workers. Using different samples and estimation procedures, we have not found a significant negative effect of immigration on the employment rates of native workers. The corresponding estimated elasticity is low, around -0.1, when considering only legal immigrants, and is not significant when considering both legal and illegal immigrants.

Female employment and occupational changes in the 1990s: How is the EU performing relative to the US?

Abstract This paper provides a comparison of the incidence and composition of female employment both in the EU and in the US. Despite a significant increase in female labour market participation in the EU, about 50% of the difference between the employment rates in the US and the EU can still be attributed to differences in the educational attainments and the employment rates of women aged 25–54. We highlight the main features of female employment in both areas, paying particular attention to the differences across age cohorts and educational levels. Our main findings are as follows: (i) the educational level of the EU female population is slowly converging to that of the US across age cohorts, (ii) the employment rates of less educated women are much lower in the EU than in the US (with the exceptions of the Scandinavian countries) even for women aged 25–34, and (iii) occupational segregation is lower for the younger highly educated women who seem to be entering more typically male occupations and less typically female occupations, although at a higher rate in the US than in the EU.

Public Sector Wage Gaps in Spanish Regions

This paper provides an approximation to the measurement of public sector wage gaps in Spanish regions. By using data from the European Community Household Panel, it is shown that the balance between what private firms pay in the local market and what the public sector pays, differs substantially in different areas of the country. Public sector wage differences among Spanish regions are mostly due to differences in returns, not to differences in characteristics or to selection effects, and are not constant across gender, educational levels, or occupations. Moreover, in those regions where Regional Governments have a higher weight in public employment, public wage gaps are higher and public employers pay higher returns. There also seems to be a cross-regional positive correlation between public wage gaps and unemployment, and a negative one between labour productivity and public wage gaps. Hence, a tentative conclusion is that the incentives to select into the public sector are higher in the low productivity regions, precisely those where scarcity of human capital in the private sector may be the most important factor for explaining economic backwardness.This paper provides an approximation to the measurement of public sector wage gaps in Spanish regions. By using data from the European Community Household Panel, it is shown that the balance between what private firms pay in the local market and what the public sector pays, differs substantially in different areas of the country. Public sector wage differences among Spanish regions are mostly due to differences in returns, not to differences in characteristics or to selection effects, and are not constant across gender, educational levels, or occupations. Moreover, in those regions where Regional Governments have a higher weight in public employment, public wage gaps are higher and public employers pay higher returns. There also seems to be a cross regional positive correlation between public wage gaps and unemployment, and a negative one between labour productivity and public wage gaps. Hence, a tentative conclusion is that the incentives to select into the public sector are higher in the low productivity regions, precisely those where scarcity of human capital in the private sector may be the most important factor for explaining economic backwardness.