Recent Labour Market Trends in the Visegrad Group Countries

The large declines in the Slovak and Czech employment appeared because the countries' GDPs grew smaller while real wages grew bigger. Shorter working hours and limitations on labour productivity that the two countries introduced could not reverse the unfavourable employment trends that occurred during economic downturn.Duże spadki zatrudnienia w Słowacji i Czechach były związane ze słabym wzrostem PKB i silnym wzrostem płac realnych. Redukcje czasu pracy i wydajności pracy nie były w stanie odwrócić niekorzystnych tendencji w zatrudnieniu

The Aims of Lifelong Learning: Age-Related Effects of Training on Wages and Job Security

This study analyses the effects of training participation on wages and perceived job security for employees of different ages. Based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, results indicate that only younger workers benefit from training by an increase in wages, whereas older employees' worries about losing their job are reduced. This observation can also be explained by the fact that goals of training courses are related to the age of participants. Moreover, I differentiate between workers who permanently and only occasionally participate in training. The results indicate that there seem to be decreasing marginal returns to training with respect to job security

Poaching and firm-sponsored training: first clean evidence

A series of seminal theoretical papers argues that poaching of employees may hamper company-sponsored general training. However, the extent of poaching, its determinants and consequences, remains an open empirical question. We provide a novel empirical identification strategy for poaching and investigate its causes and consequences. We find that only a small number of training firms in Germany are poaching victims. Firms are more likely to poach employees during an economic downturn. Training firms respond to poaching by lowering the share of new apprentice intakes in the following years

Einfluss von befristeter Beschäftigung und Kündigungsschutz auf die Arbeitsproduktivität: Evidenz aus einem branchenspezifischen Panel von EU-Ländern

In recent years the availability of new industry-level data allowed to evaluate the impact of labour market policies more consistently than previous standard cross-country studies. In this paper an industry-level panel is exploited to evaluate the impact of Employment Protection Legislation (EPL) for temporary employment (TE), along with permanent employment (PE), in EU countries. Indeed, the advantage of using industry-level data is manifold. The method exploits both cross-country variation in EPL for PE and TE and variation in the relevance of EPL in different industries deriving from a particular diff-in-diff assumption. Differently from the previous literature we apply this idea of the different binding of EPL only for PE, whereas we implement a different strategy for TE which should imply a more accurate identification of the effect of the use of TE on labour productivity. The theoretical literature has not established a clear prediction on the sign of the effects, existing different convincing reasons for both directions. Thus, the results of the analysis have potentially important policy implications. Our main finding is that the use of temporary contracts has a negative, even if small in magnitude, effect on labour productivity. Furthermore, the analysis confirms that EPL for regular contracts reduce labour productivity growth more in those industries requiring a greater employment reallocation

The production and reproduction of inequality in the UK in times of austerity

Inequality appears to be back on the intellectual and political agenda. This paper provides a commentary on this renewed interest, drawing on an empirical discussion of inequality in the UK. The paper argues that inequality should be seen as produced in the inherently unequal social relations of production, drawing attention to the role of social struggle in shaping dynamics of inequality. However, inequality is not just produced in dynamic class struggle in the formal economy, but also through the social reproduction of labour power on a day-to-day and inter-generational basis. As such, inequalities of household resources at any point in time may be reproductive of greater future inequality. It is argued that inequality has risen in the UK over recent decades because of changes in the social relations of production in the formal economy and social reproduction in the domestic sector, both of which have witnessed significant state interventions that have increased structural inequalities. It is argued that, absent of significant change, the underpinning structural dynamics in the UK will lead to further increases in inequality over the short and longer-term. Given this, we might expect to see an already emergent ‘New Politics of Inequality’ intensifying in the coming decades.n/