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This paper presents new evidence on the interaction between demographic and occupational change in Europe over the last 25 years. We use data from the European Union Labour Force Survey covering six European countries. The analysis is based on a cross‐sectional comparison between the population and employment distributions in 1995 and 2019. This strategy allows us to study the changing demographic dynamics, which have brought a more feminized, aged, and educated working population, in a context of structural employment change, where higher job polarization or occupational upgrading are the main patterns. The results indicate that the increasing female participation has been associated with a strong general process of occupational upgrading that particularly benefited women. Still, the occupational profile of women is polarized relative to men. Although the process of educational upgrading was also stronger for women and overall they improved their occupational profile more than that of men, we find declining occupational returns to higher education for female workers in two countries. Finally, while European labor markets could accommodate the large increase in older workers, their occupational profile suffered some downgrading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political debates about immigration provoke strong nationalistic pushback from citizens, constraining the policymaking capacity of states. This paper investigates to what extent labour market policies shape economically motivated preferential divides among European citizens. On the one hand, I concentrate on prospective job loss threats indicative of economic grievances and assess the impact of unemployment risk exposure on immigration policy attitudes. On the other hand, as the original contribution of the paper, I contend that, if such an economically motivated explanation holds, this relationship should vary based on the labour market institutions in each country. Multi‐level analyses of 16 European countries over a decade since 2002 reveal a remarkably robust relationship between unemployment risks and more restrictive immigration policy attitudes. Importantly, more protective employment regulations seem to have a dampening effect on the impact of job loss threats on immigration policy attitudes. Conversely, there are larger attitudinal divides between the risk‐exposed and the more secure workers in countries with generous and expansive unemployment compensation policies. Overall, the paper helps explain the cross‐national variation in economically motivated cleavages about immigration policy attitudes in Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper analyses the determinants of public opinion on flexibilisation of work contracts. While the literature on new labour market divides has rapidly expanded, few contributions directly look at employees' demands for labour market regulation. By using a multi‐level data set for 25 European countries, we find that the subjectively assessed job security is an important and valuable predictor of preferences for flexibilisation. In particular, those with very low and very high levels of perceived job security prefer flexibilisation compared to those with medium levels. We also show that the effect is stronger in countries with stricter employment protection legislation. The findings contribute to the literature on new divides of labour market politics in several ways. First, our empirical operationalization is related directly to the core of insider‐outsider theory, the protection of work contracts. Second, subjective assessment of employment security yields important complementary insights into a debate usually focusing on objective measures. Third, we find that the (subjective) divide is context dependent; it is much more visible in countries where employment protection regulation is strong. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Methods of functional regional taxonomy and concrete definitions of functional regions based on prevailing population flows have been discussed in many regional studies. The resulting regions have been given various names (travel‐to‐work areas, local labour market areas, housing market areas, etc.) based on the character of the input data and the method of their definition. However, in most cases only one country (or part thereof) at a time has been analysed. The paper brings a unique definition of functional regions with comparable parameters suitable for international comparisons. Three Central European countries with different settlement and regional structures are analysed. The functional regions in all countries are objectivised through the operation with the constraint function, which estimates natural and non‐normative values for the self‐containment and size parameters. Two interaction measures are used in the regionalisation algorithm. Besides the methodological contribution, the role of spatial behaviour is briefly discussed, and an interpretation of the results and a proposal for the possible application of functional regions in regional planning and regional analysis in international research tasks is given. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our empirical analysis focuses on the effect of regional policies on migration attraction factors in Europe. We employ a regression discontinuity design to assess the causal relationship between the reception of large amounts of public funds and migration flows in the EU‐15 regions. In highly‐subsidised regions, we find a large increase in the share of foreign citizens from less‐developed countries when compared to low‐subsidised regions with similar pre‐treatment characteristics. The analysis shows that such an increase is due to the positive impact of the European regional policy on job market opportunities as well as the improvement of public goods supply. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT The current economic crisis has had spatially differentiated impacts in both the US and Europe. A growing collection of literature investigates the determinants of the magnitude of this recession across regions. This paper aims to contribute to this literature by analysing variations in unemployment rate across European regions over the period 2004-11. In particular, we focus on two apparently neglected issues, namely labour market rigidity and the sensitivity of the local economy to the national or European business cycle. The rigidity of the labour market is increasingly viewed as a possible reason for differences among countries in terms of the performance of labour markets, although existing empirical evidence remains inconclusive. In this respect, our aim is to assess the relevance of national labour legislation, as measured by the OECD Employment Protection Legislation (EPL) Index for the performance of regional labour markets by taking advantage of the natural experiment provided by the crisis. Furthermore, for the first time in economic literature, we employ quarterly data on unemployment rate for all European regions over the period 2000-11 to construct an index of co-movement regarding regional cycles with national or European cycles, to be used as an important determinant of variation in the unemployment rate. After controlling for a number of covariates, as well as for spatial dependence in various forms, our results indicate that EPL did not affect unemployment growth over the entire period. However, we did find that regions with a low long-term unemployment rate in countries with high EPL performed better in the pre-crisis period (2004-07), whereas no effect was found during the crisis. We also found that synchronisation of the regional cycle with the national one was significant for explaining regional labour market performance. Taken together, these results denote the limited relevance of national policies and legislation for accommodating spatially differentiated shocks, whereas policies aimed at modifying local cycles may prove to be more effective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses microeconomic data for more than 100,000 European individuals in order to analyse whether the individual economic returns to education vary between migrants and non-migrants and whether any differences in earnings between these two groups are affected by household and/or geographical (regional and interregional) externalities. The results point out that while education is a fundamental determinant of earnings, European labour markets do not discriminate in the returns to education between migrants and non-migrants. Household, regional and supra-regional externalities influence the economic returns to education in a similar way for local, intranational and supra-national migrants. The results are robust to the introduction of a large number of individual, household and regional controls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper the competitive strength and weaknesses of unifying and enlarging Europe in the global economy are examined. The focus is on people at work, their skills, and competencies. The idea of flexibility-based competition is developed implicating product and services portfolios, technologies, volumes, quality standards, distribution networks, and development cycles. Flexibility calls for speed maximizing management and special work force and labor markets characteristics. A new employment policy should change European labor markets making them more flexible and enabling “high-speed management.” People able to adjust to flexible labor markets are described as “niche finders.” Those who are equipped to excel in such markets and to win the competition game are presented in this paper as “top performers.” Educational systems and particularly management education and development have to undergo deep restructuring to meet the challenge. An outline of new management education is provided. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Hum Factors Man 15: 35–47, 2005. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at the migrants' occupational integration process. Two main theoretical perspectives are tested: the first one (assimilation view) claims that in the short-run migrants are penalized, but as they settle in the receiving country they get integrated into the host society; the second one (segmented assimilation view) claims that disadvantages persist in the long-run. EU-LFS and ESS data are described and modelled, in order to compare the labour market performances of migrants in four European old-receiving countries (Germany, France, Great Britain and Sweden) and in two new-receiving countries (Spain and Italy) both in a short-term and in a long-run perspective. We find that a) in the short-run, migrants' labour market condition is worst with respect to the natives; b) this gap decreases with older migrants; c) the ethnic penalty disappears with the second generation, when they achieve a level of education comparable to that of the natives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the main questions for politicians is how to introduce more flexibility in the labour market while still providing employees with ample social security. The concept of flexicurity has sprung to attention through its success in Denmark. This paper explores whether the Danish model can also be successful in other European countries. A simultaneous equations model is constructed and estimated using regional data, which is an extension of the Blanchard-Katz model developed in 1992. It is found that a European country such as the Netherlands can permanently lower its unemployment rate and increase its participation and employment growth rates at the regional level, by 1.47, 2.08 and 1.05 percentage points respectively, if it copies the Danish model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the issue of the relationship between internal migration rates at NUTS 2 level and economic developments. For five European countries, several hypotheses were tested on three groups of economic variables: general business cycle indicators, financial variables as well as variables reflecting more structural labour market developments. The empirical analysis is based on first differences of all variables. Although some support was found for all of the hypotheses tested but one, the main conclusion is that there is a stable relationship between GDP per capita and internal migration that is highly similar across countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evidence during the nineties about the response of real wages to shocks highlights that this response is substantially lower in European countries than in the United States and that there are important differences among European countries. Which are the reasons that explain these different reactions? In this paper, we apply meta-analytical techniques in order to provide a quantitative summary of the available evidence regarding the influence of labour market institutions on real wage flexibility. We find that the design of the study affects the obtained results, and that in more deregulated labour markets with a lower presence of trade unions, this response is particularly larger. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to analyze how the change of policy problems have affected the interaction between governments and labor market organizations in the European economies with centralized wage bargaining: Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, Austria and Germany. The unique feature for these economies is that wages to a large extent are determined by central wage agreements between economy-wide labor market organizations[2]. These are forced to take the macro-economic effects of their behavior and likely government responses into account in a way that does not occur under decentralized wage setting. The roles of the government and labor market organizations do, however, differ between the various countries. It is these differences in 'policy regimes' that is the subject here. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses a study which focused on the development of an economic procedure that integrates a theory-guided analysis of determinants of regional disparities with standard classification approaches. The researchers designed the procedure to resolve limitations that commonly exist in classification schemes including the lack of a theoretically meaningful organization of the variable selection process. They also examined the conditions in the labor market which affect the outcomes of a policy related to an active labor market.