Marloes de Graaf-Zijl

Household joblessness and its impact on poverty and deprivation in Europe

Working-age households where no-one is in work have become an increasing focus of policy concern even before the economic crisis, and the European Union (EU) has included household joblessness in its new poverty reduction target for 2020. This paper focuses on the variation across EU countries in the prevalence of household joblessness and its impact on income poverty and deprivation, and on the implications for the new EU poverty reduction target. It highlights first that there are some divergences across key data sources in the extent of joblessness. The prevalence of household joblessness varies substantially across EU countries, but there is little evidence of a consistent pattern among groupings of countries often categorized together in terms of welfare regime or geographically. In aggregate there is little association between the overall extent of household joblessness in a country and the percentage in relative income poverty or above a material deprivation threshold. At a micro level, being in a jobless household has a substantial impact on the likelihood of being in relative income poverty or deprived, but the scale of these impacts is shown to be very much greater in some countries than in others, and to vary between single-adult and multiple-adult households. In most EU countries little more than half the working-age adults in jobless households are either income-poor or deprived, so including joblessness in the poverty reduction target does make a difference, without a clearly articulated rationale.

Temporary agency work and the business cycle

The Netherlands leads the world in the use of temporary agency workers: in 2000 nearly 5 per cent of Dutch employees were agency workers. The use of agency workers is very sensitive to business cycle fluctuations. This paper reports on an exploration of the relation between GDP and agency work. We developed a theoretical model for the time interdependence of GDP, agency work and regular employment, and tested model predictions using a VAR model. The results show that temporary agency work leads GDP development. A positive GDP shock is followed by an increase in the use of agency work for two years, but decreased use in the three subsequent years.

Compensation of On-call and Fixed-term Employment: the Role of Uncertainty

This paper analyses the compensation of fixed�?term and on�?call employment contracts, applying an analytical framework in which wage differentials result from two types of uncertainty. Quantity uncertainty originates from product demand volatility. Quality uncertainty, on the other hand, originates from the fact that employers are ex�?ante unable to observe fully a workers ability. Using matching techniques, we analyse wage differentials using linked employer–employee data for the Netherlands. Findings indicate that on�?call workers receive compensation for providing quantity flexibility, or at least did so before the regulatory change in 1999. Compensation of fixed�?term contracts, however, is dominated by the negative wage effect of quality uncertainty.