Temporary and circular labour migration : reassessing established public policies

Today, Temporary Labour Migration is a fundamental course of action promoted by relevant economic and political agents, such as EC, the GCIM, or the OECD. Based on a specific empirical case study of Temporary and Circular Labour Migration in the Catalonian agrarian sector, which has been distinguished as a particularly successful formula, we identify a new area of interest: the emergence of a new empirical migrant category, the Circular Labour Migrant, which remains theoretically unnamed and lacks public recognition. We argue that, until now, there have been two historical phases regarding temporary labour migration: one of total deregulation and another of partial regulation, led by private actors with support from public institutions, and featuring circularity. IN a developed Welfare State context, it would be normatively pertinent to except a step towards a third phase, one involving the institutionalization of this new mobility category through the elaboration of a public policy.

Assessing the Political Viability of Labour Market Reform: The Case of Employment Protection

We analyze the political support for employment protection legislation. Unlike my previous work on the same topic, this paper pays a lot of attention to the role of obsolescence in the growth process. In voting in favour of employment protection, incumbent employees trade off lower living standards (because employment protection maintains workers in less productive activities) against longer job duration. The support for employment protection will then depend on the value of the latter relative to the cost of the former. We highlight two key deeterminants of this trade-off: first, the workers' bargaining power, second, the economy's growth rate-more precisely its rate of creative destruction.

Labour Market Formation Patterns in Nineteenth Century Catalonia

In this paper we portray the features of the Catalan textiles labour market in a period of technological change. Supply and demand for labour as well as a gendered view of living standards are presented. A first set of results is that labour supply adjusts to changes in labour demand trough the spread of new demographic attitudes. In this respect we imply that labour economic agents (or labour population) were able to modify the economic condition of their children. A second set of results refers to living standards and income distribution inequality. In this respect we see that unemployment and protectionism were the main sources breeding income inequality. A third set of results deals with the extreme labour market segmentation according to gender. Since women s real wages did not obey to an economic rationale we conclude that women were outside the labour market.

Predestination and the Protestant ethic

This paper shows an equivalence result between the utility functions of secularagents who abide by a moral obligation to accumulate wealth and those of religiousagents who believe that salvation is immutable and preordained by God. Thisresult formalizes Weber's renowned thesis on the connection between the worldlyasceticism of Protestants and the religious premises of Calvinism. Furthermore,ongoing economies are often modeled with preference relations such as "Keeping upwith the Joneses" which are not associated with religion. Our results relate thesesecular economies of today and economies of the past shaped by religious ideas.

Protestants and Catholics: Similar work ethic, different social ethic

This article develops two hypotheses about economically-relevant values of Christianbelievers, according to which Protestants should work more and more effectively, as in the work ethic argument of Max Weber, or display a stronger social ethic that would lead themto monitor each other s conduct, support political and legal institutions and hold morehomogeneous values. Tests using current survey data confirm substantial partial correlations andpossible different effects in mutual social control, institutional performance and homogeneityof values but no difference in work ethics. Protestantism therefore seems conducive to capitalisteconomic development, not by the direct psychological route of the Weberian work ethic butrather by promoting an alternative social ethic that facilitates impersonal trade.

Female labour supply in Spain: The importance of behavioural assumptions and unobserved heterogeneity specification

We estimate four models of female labour supply using a Spanish sampleof married women from 1994, taking into account the complete form of theindividual s budget set. The models differ in the hypotheses relating tothe presence of optimisation errors and/or the way non-workers contributeto the likelihood function. According to the results, the effects of wagesand non-labour income on the labour supply of Spanish married women dependon the specification used. The model which has both preference andoptimisation errors and allows for both voluntarily and involuntarilyunemployed females desiring to participate seems to better fit the evidencefor Spanish married women.

The impact of tax credits on labour supply

One of the principle aims of the Working Families' Tax Credit in the UK was to increase the participation of single mothers. The literature to date concludes there was approximately a five-percentage-point increase in employment of single mothers. The differences-in-differences methodology that is typically used compares single mother with single women without children. However, the characteristics of these groups are very different, and change over time in relative covariates are likely to violate the identifying assumption. We find that when we control for differential trends between women with and without children, the employment effect of the policy falls significantly. Moreover, the effect is borne solely by those working full-time (30 hours or more), while having no effect on inducing people into the labor market from inactivity. Looking closely at important covariates over time, we can see sizeable changes in the relative returns to employment between the treatment and control groups.

Long-run selection and the work ethic

That individuals contribute in social dilemma interactions even when contributing is costly is a well-established observation in the experimental literature. Since a contributor is always strictly worse off than a non-contributor the question is raised if an intrinsic motivation to contribute can survive in an evolutionary setting. Using recent results on deterministic approximation of stochastic evolutionary dynamics we give conditions for equilibria with a positive number of contributors to be selected in the long run.

The rise and decline of children's labour participation levels during the early stages of industrialisation. Catalonia (1850-1925)

This article aims to analyse the reasons for the intensive use of childlabour in the 19th century and its subsequent decline in the first thirdof the 20th century in the context of an economy with a highly flexiblelabour supply like that of Catalonia. During the second half of the 19thcentury,factors relating to family economies, such as numerous familiesand low wages for adults, along with the technologies of the time thatrequired manual labour resources, would appear to explain the intensiveuse of child labour to the detriment of schooling. The technologicalchanges that occurred during the first third of the 20th century, thedemographic transition and adult wage increase (for both men and women)explain the schooling of children up to the age of 15 and theconsequent practical abolition of child labour in that new era ofeconomic modernisation.

Assesing the political viability of labour market reform: The case of employment protection

We analyze the political support for employment protection legislation.Unlike my previous work on the same topic, this paper pays a lot ofattention to the role of obsolescence in the growth process.In voting in favour of employment protection, incumbent employeestrade off lower living standards (because employment protectionmaintains workers in less productive activities) against longer jobduration. The support for employment protection will then depend onthe value of the latter relative to the cost of the former. Wehighlight two key deeterminants of this trade-off: first, the workers'bargaining power, second, the economy's growth rate-more preciselyits rate of creative destruction.

Retirement incentives, individual heterogeneity and labour transitions of employed and unemployed workers

In this paper we analyze the sensitivity of the labour market decisions of workers close toretirement with respect to the incentives created by public regulations. We improve upon the extensiveprior literature on the effect of pension incentives on retirement in two ways. First, bymodeling the transitions between employment, unemployment and retirement in a simultaneousmanner, paying special attention to the transition from unemployment to retirement (which is particularlyimportant in Spain). Second, by considering the influence of unobserved heterogeneity inthe estimation of the effect of our (carefully constructed) incentive variables.Using administrative data, we find that, when properly defined, economic incentives have astrong impact on labour market decisions in Spain. Unemployment regulations are shown to be particularlyinfluential for retirement behaviour, along with the more traditional determinants linked tothe pension system. Pension variables also have a major bearing on both workers reemploymentdecisions and on the strategic actions of employers. The quantitative impact of the incentives, however,is greatly affected by the existence of unobserved heterogeneity among workers. Its omissionleads to sizable biases in the assessment of the sensitivity to economic incentives, a finding thathas clear consequences for the credibility of any model-based policy analysis. We confirm theimportance of this potential problem in one especially interesting instance: the reform of earlyretirement provisions undertaken in Spain in 2002. We use a difference-in-difference approach tomeasure the behavioural reaction to this change, finding a large overestimation when unobservedheterogeneity is not taken into account.

Labour market in the Catalan cotton textile sector: Employment and fertility (1850-1913)

This paper deals whit the dynamics of the Catalan textile labour market (theSpanish region that concentrated most of the industrial and factory activity duringthe 19 Century) and offers hypotheses and results on the impact it had on livingstandards and fertility levels. We observe the formation of an uneven labourmarket in which male supply for labour (excluding women and children) grewmuch faster than the demand. We stress the fact that labour supply is verydependant on institutional factors liked to the transmition of household propertybetween generations. Instead the slow path of growth of adult males demand forlabour is witnessing the limits of this industry to expand and to compete ininternational markets. The strategy of working class families to adapt to scarceopportunities of employment we document here is the diminution of legitimatefertility levels. Fertility control is the direct instrument we think workers have tocontrol their number in a situation that was likely to create labour surpluses in theshort and mid run.

The impact of firing costs on turnover and unemployment: Evidence from the Colombian labour market reform

Reductions in firing costs are often advocated as a way of increasingthe dynamism of labour markets in both developed and less developed countries. Evidence from Europe and the U.S. on the impact of firing costs has, however, been mixed. Moreover, legislative changes both in Europe and the U.S. have been limited. This paper, instead, examines the impact of the Colombian Labour Market Reform of 1990, which substantially reduced dismissal costs. I estimate the incidence of a reduction in firing costs on worker turnover by exploiting the temporal change in the Colombian labour legislation as well as the variability in coverage between formal and informal sector workers. Using a grouping estimator to control for common aggregate shocks and selection, I find that the exit hazard rates into and out of unemployment increased after the reform by over 1% for formal workers (covered by the legislation) relative to informal workers (uncovered). The increase of the hazards implies a net decrease in unemployment of a third of a percentage point, which accounts for about one quarter of the fall in unemployment during the period of study.

Informal care and labour force participation among middle-aged women in Spain

Informal care is today the form of support most commonly used by those who need other peoplein order to carry out certain activities that are considered basic (eating, dressing, taking a shower,etc.), in Spain and in most other countries in the region. The possible labour opportunity costsincurred by these informal carers, the vast majority of whom are middle-aged women, have not asyet been properly quantified in Spain. It is, however, crucially important to know these quantities ata time when public authorities appear to be determined to extend the coverage offered up to nowas regards long-term care.In this context, we use the Spanish subsample of the European Community Household Panel (1994-2001) to estimate a dynamic ordered probit and so attempt to examine the effects of various typesof informal care on labour behaviour. The results obtained indicate the existence of labouropportunity costs for those women who live with the dependent person they care for, but not forthose who care for someone outside the household. Furthermore, whereas caregiving for morethan a year has negative effects on labour force participation, the same cannot be said of those who start caregiving and stop caregiving .

A study of the labour market trajectories in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg

We present an analysis of the register of all unemployment episodes in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg over a recent period of 55 months. We apply propensity score matching to account forthe systematic differences among the groups of subjects (registrants) and unemployment spells.We devise graphical and tabular summaries for describing the sequences of employment states ofthe members of the labour force who register at Agence pour le d?veloppement de l'emploi, theLuxembourg Public Unemployment Agency. Some employment-related information about themis collected by linking their records to the national register of social security contributions, maintained by Inspection g?n?rale de la s?curit? sociale. A class of univariate indices for characterisingthe sequences of labour force states is defined.