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Europe is hardly homogenous on any count of labour market regulation or on any measure of labour market performance. This basic point seems to have been missed by most research as the majority of scholars have rather concentrated on the unilateral analysis of the factors accountable for fractures in the old evolutionary logics-globalization, technological change, demographic ageing, post-industrialization and tertiarization- while neglecting the systematic analysis of the different reforms paths that have been taken up in different countries. The objective of this paper is thus to explore the factors that lay behind the different ways in which common reform pressure are refracted differently across national contest according to pre-existent institutional arrangements and strategic interaction between relevant actors. Among the set of alternative explanations for national variation this paper will focus on path dependencies in labour market reforms that stem from the pre-existent welfare regime, firms' main competitive strategy and characteristics of the political process of reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Absence from the workplace due to sickness is common and costly, and yet we have little evidence on the structural factors that account for individual and societal variation in sickness absence. In short, why do some individuals miss more work due to sickness than others, and why do some societies exhibit higher sickness absence rates than others? One approach, drawn from the theory of moral hazard in economics, explains sickness absence as a function of incentives: where workers have access to higher levels of sick-leave pay, they will be absent from work more often due to sickness. Likewise, where it is easier to fire unproductive workers because of weak employment protection legislation, sickness absence should be reduced (which could interpreted as a function either of economic incentives, or the balance of power between employers and employees). In this paper, we evaluate these predictions relative to a baseline expectation drawn from medical sociology and social epidemiology that sickness absence reflects health and well-being, such that a lack of health and well-being keeps workers away from work. Evidence from European Union Labor Force Surveys, including 5,940,564 individuals from 20 countries surveyed between 1992 and 2006, suggests that sickness absence is patterned such that older workers, women, the less-educated, and the lower classes have higher rates of sickness absence. By contrast, there is very little evidence of moral-hazard or employment-regulation effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]