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An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles on topics including labor market of Great Britain; emergence of a new form of technological management or Taylorooism; and employment stabilization.

This paper evaluates the effectiveness of short-time work (STW) schemes for preserving jobs and reducing the segmentation between stable and unstable jobs observed in dual labour markets. For this purpose, we develop and simulate an equilibrium search and matching model considering the situation of the Spanish 2012 labour market reform as a benchmark. Our steady-state results show that the availability of STW schemes does not necessarily reduce unemployment and job destruction. The effectiveness of this measure depends on the degree of subsidization of payroll taxes it may entail: with a 33 % subsidy, we find that STW is quite beneficial for the Spanish economy because it reduces both unemployment and labour market segmentation. We also perform a cost-benefit analysis that shows that there is scope for Pareto improvements when STW is subsidized. Again, the STW scenario with a 33 % subsidy on payroll taxes seems the most beneficial because more than 57 % of workers improve. These workers also experience a significant increase in annual income that could be used to compensate the losers from this policy change and the State for the fiscal balance deterioration. This reform saves the highest number of jobs and has the lowest deadweight costs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper analyses the impact of changes made after the collapse of the asset inflated bubble economy to the Japanese employment system. The characteristic features of the traditional lifetime employment system have been presented together with their underlying rationality. It has been deeply rooted in the changes to the country's post-war social system; especially the changes to the family model and the mismatch between the education and the needs of the labour market. The lifetime employment has not been the sole source of the country's economic success nor has it been the sole reason of its post-bubble failure. But it provided much needed employment stability (and to some extent also an income stability). Attempted liberalisation of the allegedly too rigid system by lifting restrictions on one section of non-regular employment (dispatched workers category) failed to enhance the flexibility of the traditional employment while producing undesirable macroeconomic consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses employment stability in Spanish labor law as of March 2013, focusing on an analysis of the Spanish legal system's protection of workers against unfair dismissals, as well as the judiciary's reported preference for indefinite contracts over fixed-term contracts. Labor law reform efforts in Spain are addressed, along with an examination of the impact of the Global Financial Crisis of the early 21st century on Spain's labor market. Youth unemployment in Spain is assessed.

As consequence of constant changes and rapid expiration of knowledge that occur at all level of the current information society, the education, training and selection of a profession is not a single decision for life which ends accessing at the first job, but a continuous process too. People who are seeking education and training try to take advantage of maximum benefit of their formation. In this context the aim of this paper is to provide empirical evidence of the effects of continuous training on Employment Stability in the Spanish labor market. The dependent variable includes two situations of the active workers: continuous and discontinuous employability. To distinguish between them an Employability Index Stability was calculated taking into account two factors: employed time and job security. The data obtained from a survey of a nationwide sample of918 employed individuals has been analysed through a binary logit model. The coefficients estimated have revealed a positive and significant relationship between the probability of employment stability and continuous vocational training received. The results obtained in this study showed that the whole process of education of people influences the career choices and work-life. So it is important to redefine the role of educators and trainers, and adapt new teaching-learning methods to promote awareness and capacity building and skills that enable workers to enter and stay in a new working environment conditioned by important changes in techniques of education and economic and social systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

About 4,000 journalists started their career after the year 2000; a generation who emerged during the financial and economic crisis. A generation facing a permanent downturn in the labour market: companies closing, merging, integrating in multimedia groups with the inherent reduction of employees. In this group of journalists, there are certainly those holding some hope of moving forward with the profession. There are also those, for the most varied reasons, who rapidly reached headship positions. But within the group of young people with the license issued by the Portfolio Committee for Professional Journalists, there are many who accumulate internships after internships without ever get to regularize their employment status. Likely to what is observed in other European countries, it rages, in these eternal interns, pessimism and bitterness, It rages also the disenchantment for a profession that has always been characterized by a privileged status in public space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In-work benefits, which provide financial supplements to employees in low-wage jobs, are an instrument of active labour market policy used to encourage the labour market integration of low-skilled workers and the tong-term unemployed. This paper argues that although government subsidies increase overall wages, employees interpret them as a signal that employers are unwilling to behave according to the norm of reciprocity. This leads to negative side-effects on employment stability, counteracting the positive effects of additional income on employment stability. The present article tests these hypotheses using a survey of in-work benefit recipients, with non-recipients as a comparison group. The method of propensity score matching is applied to eliminate all compositional differences between benefit recipients and non-recipients except for the source of their income. It is shown that in-work benefits lead to perceived violations of reciprocity. However, whether this explains why in-work benefits are not successful in promoting employment stability remains an open question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 20 years from 1982 to 2002, the proportion of Australian public housing tenants in employment has fallen markedly relative to Australians living in other housing tenures. This paper explores the potential causes of this trend and their policy implications. For male public renters, the declining employment participation rate can be accounted for by closer targeting of public housing to the most disadvantaged in the labour market and blunter work incentives. This is not the case for female public renters. Their employment participation rate has remained flat while improved labour market conditions should have lifted employment participation rates among this group, even after controlling for an extensive range of individual characteristics. Work incentives are important to female public renters, but further research is required if we are to understand why their employment rates have not improved over this 20-year period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study describes (1) the association between husbands' and wives' employment statuses and occupations in the Netherlands, (2) establishes possible trends in the association, and (3) explores to what extent the association can be attributed to educational homogamy. We use 12 waves of the Dutch Labor Force Survey (1994–2006), and use log-linear models to analyze the associations between the labor market positions of spouses. Overall, we find positive associations, implying that favorable positions are accumulated within households. For couples with children, the association between spouses' employment status is negative, which means that they divide paid labor. Over birth cohorts, the association between spouses' employment statuses becomes stronger, and between spouses' occupational success remains stable. Education is an important contributor to the occupational association, but still half of the association between spouses' success cannot be attributed to spouses' education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article answers three questions. To what extent do Dutch workers voluntarily change employers or positions within the firm, do objective and subjectively experienced job characteristics influence voluntary mobility, and does voluntary mobility result in changes in these job characteristics? Analyses show that voluntary mobility occurs quite often. Objective job characteristics do not predict the odds of voluntary mobility. The subjective evaluation of aspects of the job, such as for instance the job in general, the income, the job content and colleagues, and workload, however, do. The stronger this mismatch of persons and jobs, the more likely one is to be voluntarily mobile. Panel analyses furthermore show that this voluntary mobility improves objective job characteristics such as income and status, and reduces an unfavourable evaluation of the person-job fit. Clearly, an unfavourably experienced person-job fit pushes workers out of their jobs, and on average this step brings positive returns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data from 74 industrial, developing and transition countries for the years 2000–2003, this paper analyzes empirically whether and to what extent anticompetitive business regulations affect the performance of the labor market. According to the regression results, they appear to increase unemployment rates and lower employment rates. It seems that they particularly worsen the employment situation of young people. Our results are robust to variations in specification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores whether employment insecurity (i.e. unemployment and flexible employment) at labour market entry has a negative impact on parental home leaving and family formation. To answer this question, data from a large-scale European graduate survey carried out in 1998 were analysed. The results show that graduates with an insecure employment status at labour market entry are indeed less likely to leave the parental home and establish a nuclear household and family than those with stable first employment. With regard to entry into marriage and parenthood, these results especially hold true for men. Furthermore, it is found that in European countries in which unemployment among tertiary education graduates is high, the likelihood of leaving the parental home and starting a nuclear household and family is smaller than in European countries where such unemployment is low. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors suggest that full employment policies are outdated. They discuss the idea of involuntary unemployment, a primary concept of Keynesian macroeconomic theory. John Maynard Keynes felt that aggregate demand could settle at levels insufficient to motivate companies to offer sufficient numbers of jobs to employ all people who would be wiling to work. They focus on the special circumstances that enabled the adoption of Keynesian policies until the 1960s and the conditions that led to their demise in the 1970s.

The article focuses on the objective to increase employment rate in Great Britain. The government has introduced a "Welfare to Work" program to reduce barriers to the labor market and reduce poverty with a commitment to reduce the number of incapacity benefit claimants by establishing the Employment and Support Allowance. Further proposal includes the support to help individuals to work and improve the local economy by coordinating with the private and voluntary sectors.

There has been considerable debate as to whether job stability has declined in the United States. This paper uses data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to examine the incidence of labor market turnover between 1986 and 1993. Specifically, we calculate one- and two-year separation rates and then analyze turnover by the source of separation. We find that the incidence of job separations did not increase over the period under investigation, but appears to have declined somewhat. When analyzing separations by reason, conditional on separating from an employer, we find little evidence of temporal changes in the composition of turnover that would indicate greater employment instability. Therefore, we do not find conclusive evidence that employment relationships have become more unstable in the recent past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the relationship between employment tenure and productivity in European countries. It discusses different labor market systems existing in Europe. Tenure is considered as an essentiality both for employees' security and companies' productivity. A variety of factors affect supply and demand in the labor markets, which determine employment tenure. Stability of the labor market is also discussed. Pooled sectoral productivity and tenure data, which cover six major sectors for the years 1992 to 2002 are used in the article. The sample is consist of 822 observations on which labor productivity is regressed. A positive relationship between tenure and labor productivity is indicated. It is viewed that some degree of stability in employment is essential for productivity. It is found that employment stability is essential for job training. Employment stability and job training are essential for running a business organization. The article suggests that government and social partners should play a balancing role in employment protection and the use of labor market policies in employment relationships.

Discusses the efforts of the European Union (EU) to attain full employment in in its labor market. Statistical data regarding EU employment rates; Challenges experienced by the EU in reaching employment targets; Suggested measures in enchancing employment rates.

The need for school-to-work programs or other means of increasing early job market stability is predicated on the view that the "chaotic" nature of youth labor markets in the United States is costly because workers drift from one job to another without developing skills, behavior, or other characteristics that in turn lead to higher adult earnings. However, there is also ample evidence that workers receive positive returns to job shopping. This paper asks whether youths in unstable jobs early in their careers suffer adverse labor market consequences as adults. Its specific contribution is to account for the endogenous determination of early job stability and adult wages as outcomes of a job search/job shopping process. Labor market conditions in the early years in the labor market are used as instrumental variables for the job stability experienced during those years. The instrumental variables estimates generally point to substantial positive effects of early job stability on adult wages, in contrast to OLS estimates, which indicate little or no relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This examination of policies relating to the internal cultivation of human resources and high-performance work systems among a sample of Singapore-based organizations shows that the HRM practices under consideration reflect three distinct dimensions: internal staffing, employee development, and employment stability. Of the three dimensions, only employee development was significantly and positively related to high-performance work systems. Contrary to the arguments in the literature relating to internal labour markets, mutual commitment HRM, and high-performance work systems, policies involving internal staffing and employment stability were not found to be necessary components of the internally oriented HRM package. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article describes how the 1993-6 Australian Labor government modernized its commitment to full employment by combining labor market programmes and social security reforms to create a Job Compact for the long-term unemployed. It draws out lessons of relevance to the British Labour government which has committed itself to using job guarantees to build new bridges between welfare and work. During the 1980s Labor governments had succeeded in reducing unemployment which reached a low point of 5.7 per cent in 1989. However, in the early 1990s a deep recession saw unemployment increase to 11 per cent, with the number of unemployed people receiving benefit for over a year jumping from 115,380 to 354,174 between 1991 and 1993. The unexpected success of the Labor Party in the 1993 general election owed much to the commitment of the government to tackle unemployment as well as to electoral fears about the tax policies of the opposition. Following his victory the Labor prime minister swiftly appointed a Committee on Employment Opportunities.

This paper studies the effects of repeated interviewing (termed interview group bias) on the accuracy of aggregate unemployment rates computed from the Current Population Survey. Studies of rotation group bias at the aggregate level have shown that reports of labor force status vary systematically with the number of times a household has been sampled. This paper presents estimates of the systematic variation using microdata and shows that previous studies have underestimated its magnitude. It is shown that rotation group bias is a special case of interview group bias and that the magnitude of interview group bias is substantial enough that unemployment rates across groups interviewed only once can be more than 50% higher than for groups interviewed four times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the process of growth, costs of adjustment and cost savings are two sides of the same coin. Both are equally important. This paper, however, focuses on the cost savings or gains the employer may derive from growth. Firm growth, other * I would like to thank Michael Gort and Winston W. Chang to whom I owe intellectual debts. Discussions with Taradas Bandyopadhyay and Murray Brown are gratefully acknowledged. I am also grateful to the Associate Editor and an anonymous referee of this JOURNAL for their helpful comments and suggestions, and to Robert Pomykacz for research assistance. 1 With regard to the benefits of expansion, Penrose (1959) and Marris (1971) focused their attention on the relation between thc steady-state growth rate and the profit rate. They argued that firms with higher growth rates might have advantages in R & D and investment finance which might lead to higher profit rates. 2 The presence of fixed employment costs (e.g. recruitment and screening costs) leads firms to seek stability in employment. Conversely, the presence of firm-specific human capital discourages employees from changing jobs. In effect, there is a labour market internal to the firm - a subject examined in some detail by Doeringer and Piore (1970). This internal labour market breaks the connecting rod that induces wages to move with compensation paid by other firms. things being equal, increases the probability of promotion thereby decreasing compensation paid at the lower levels of the corporate hierarchy. It can be shown that the total wage bill is reduced as a result of higher growth, thus resulting in a gain to the employer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with the causes of labor market internalization; the determinants of enterprise wage structure; and the reasons why firms rely exclusively upon internal promotion. It reviews the neoclassical, radical, and institutional approaches to internal labor markets and evaluate how well these different perspectives can account for the findings of a detailed case study of internal labor markets and wage structure in the U.S. and British iron and steel industry. Author's interpretation of why internal promotion practices often are invariably maintained, and the operative constraints on wage structure are presented. Iron and steel industry experience suggests the primary cause of internal labor markets is pressure collectively exerted by workers for employment security and advancement, with consequences which may include rigid internal promotion rules. In at least a number of other U.S. industries, unions appear to have been responsible for introducing greater employment stability and regulations. In general, within U.S. unionized industries, however internal promotion rules originated, their rigidity is enforced by collective bargaining agreement.

The massive increase in unemployment throughout the OECD since the early 1970s has led governments in many countries to introduce, or to expand, labour market policies such as training schemes, employment subsidies, public works or schemes of counselling or assistance in job search. Such programmes have the objective of reducing unemployment by improving the workings of the labour market. After a description of these programmes, this article proposes a framework, based on the relationship between unemployment and vacancies (or Beveridge curve), within which the rise in unemployment can be analysed and the effects of policies and of institutions examined. This framework helps to identify the main factors which have affected the unemployment and vacancy rates in 14 of the main OECD countries over the period 1970–88. The main results are that while corporatism remains the institutional feature with the biggest single impact in sustaining low unemployment rates, labour market policies also have had a significant and well-defined effect on unemployment, which appears large relative to the budgetary costs of the programmes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses anticipated employment instability and labor market equilibrium. Researcher Phillip Cartwright has developed a simple equilibrium model under conditions of employment instability. The author alters his terms of reference somewhat to highlight the key implication of Cartwright's assumptions. All individuals are assumed to be in equilibrium at full employment, that is, any given individual is assumed to value leisure relative to income neither more nor less than any other individual. It is important to note the qualities of the equilibrium. First, dovetailing has produced an equality of wage rates in all employments; a wage equivalent to the monthly value of leisure. This general solution under conditions of dovetailing is equivalent to the limiting case under conditions of non-dovetailing. Second, the wage level has fallen. Third, a priori, we do not know whether or not dovetailing is complete. In actual markets characterized by seasonal instability in the demand for labor, dovetailing occurs but is by no means perfect. Yet demand changes obviously have had an impact on the level of wages. This apparent contradiction is resolved once it is admitted that some individuals value leisure relative to income more than other individuals; that is, once it is admitted that in actual markets there is a seasonal instability in the supply of labor also.

In this paper, we want to present the great importance of the European Social Fund on the EU labour market, which is the main financial instrument of European Union structural actions. The European Social Fund has certain fixed objectives established rigorous enough to tackle the challenges of the Member States of the European Union. These objectives will be revealed in detail in this paper, where we try to evince their incidence on the employment growth rate also. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the labor market in Germany and focuses on the concept of a so-called "Zweiter Arbeitsmarkt" (Second Labor Market), which is intended to assist unemployed citizens by eventually integrating them into the main job market. Publicly sponsored employment as well as public subsidies are an additional topic and unemployment prevention is highlighted.

Reports global economic developments as of June 2001. Changes in the job market; Comparison of the productivity rating of United States workers with workers from Japan and Europe; Factors affecting job stability; Possibility of the US to experience a recession.

Focusing only on the manufacturing sector, these earlier studies have provided little understanding of the relationship between unionism and turnover among low wage workers. The present work investigates that relationship by examining hospitals, a low wage industry in which unions have recently gained a significant foothold. As such, hospitals should provide an indication of the stabilizing effects of unionism on a group of workers employed in a classic "secondary labor market." While it is generally expected that unions will have a stabilizing influence via their effects on wages and fringes, the research reported here concentrates on the union effect on turnover, holding compensation constant. This effect represents the union impact on the structure of the internal labor market. Moreover, an estimation technique (two-stage least squares) is employed that makes it possible to control for the potential endogeneity of unionism in the turnover model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]