Search Results
Journal Article
Do temporary jobs help low-skilled workers? : surprising data from Detroit
Because Detroit randomly assigns its welfare-to-work clients to different contractors ? some favoring temporary jobs, some not ? the researchers were able to uncover surprising data on whether temping helps the disadvantaged build careers.
Journal Article
Temporary canary
Growth in the temporary staffing industry fluttered during the recession, and signs of a spring pickup are hard to read.
Working Paper
What are the short-run effects of increasing labor market flexibility?
This paper evaluates the short-run effects of introducing labor market flexibility to an economy characterized by large firing taxes. Different reforms are considered: 1) eliminating all firing taxes, 2) introducing flexible new contracts while retaining the firing taxes on workers employed previous to the reform, and 3) introducing temporary contracts. The paper finds that eliminating all firing taxes increases the unemployment rate much more in the short run than in the long run, that introducing new flexible contracts has similar effects as eliminating all firing taxes, and that ...
Newsletter
Why do firms use temporary workers?
This article explores the pros and cons of using temporary workers and their permanent counterparts. It examines firms? various motivations for using temporary employment, accounting for geographical and industry differences.
Working Paper
The evolution of the demand for temporary help supply employment in the United States
The level of temporary help supply (THS) employment surged during the late 1980s and the 1990s. However, we know little about where these workers were placed and, thus, there is a gap in our understanding of cyclical and trend industry employment in the U.S. To close this gap, we estimate the proportion of THS employees in each major U.S. industry during 1977-97 using information from input-output tables and from the Contingent Worker Supplements to the CPS surveys of February 1995 and February 1997. Our estimates indicate that almost all of the growth in THS employment is attributed to a ...
Journal Article
Temporary help services and the volatility of industry output
To gain a better understanding of how fluctuations in output influence firms' decision to hire temporary workers, the authors examine the relationship between output volatility and the use of temporary labor. They find that, all things being equal, temporary employment is higher in states with more volatile industries and lower in states with a relatively high degree of co-movement of industry output fluctuations.
Working Paper
Demand volatility and the lag between the growth of temporary and permanent employment
The growth rate of temporary help service employment is often considered to be a leading business cycle indicator, because the firing and hiring of temporary help workers typically lead that of permanent workers. However, few works in the literature focus on the mechanism that generates the lag between temporary and permanent growth. This paper investigates how demand volatility is related to the lag. Focusing on the relationship between a firm?s information extraction and their hiring/firing decisions, our simple model predicts that the average size of transitory demand shocks increase the ...
Working Paper
Measuring temporary labor outsourcing in U.S. manufacturing
Several analysts claim that firms have been using more flexible work arrangements in order to contain the costly adjustment of labor to changes in economic conditions. In particular, temporary help supply (THS) employment has increased dramatically in the last ten years. However, there is only scant evidence on the industries that are hiring this type of worker. In particular, some anecdotal evidence points to the fact that manufacturing industries have substantially stepped up their demand for THS workers since the mid-1980s. If this is true, not accounting for this flow of workers from the ...
Working Paper
Idiosyncratic risk and aggregate employment dynamics
This paper studies how producers? idiosyncratic risks affect an industry?s aggregate dynamics in an environment where certainty equivalence fails. In the model, producers can place workers in two types of jobs, organized and temporary. Workers are less productive in temporary jobs, but creating an organized job requires an irreversible investment of managerial resources. Increasing productivity risk raises the value of an unexercised option to create an organized job. Losing this option is one cost of immediate organized job creation, so an increase in its value induces substitution towards ...
Working Paper
Manufacturing plants’ use of temporary workers: an analysis using census micro data
Using plant-level data from the Plant Capacity Utilization (PCU) Survey, we examine how a manufacturing plant?s use of temporary workers is associated with the nature of its output fluctuations. Our empirical evidence suggests that plants choose temps over perms when they expect output to fall, which allows them to avoid costs associated with laying off permanent employees. We also found that plants whose output levels are associated with greater levels of uncertainty use more temps. The effects of other variables are also tested in order to examine the validity of various views about why ...