In the Land of AKM: Explaining the Dynamics of Wage Inequality in France, with Damien Babet and Olivier Godechot
Conditionally Accepted at Journal of Labor Economics -- [BdF Working paper, 2025] -- [Insee Working Paper, 2023]
Narrowing Industry Wage Premiums and the Decline in the Gender Wage Gap, with Alexandra Roulet and Mark Stabile
Labour Economics, Volume 94, June 2025
Firms create temporary jobs for different reasons: to screen candidates for permanent positions; to cope with seasonal and short-term swings in activity; to increase flexibility in the use of the workforce. We use data on the universe of temporary jobs in Italy between 2013 and 2017 to identify and characterize the firms that engage in these different strategies. Screening is not a primary driver of temporary employment: the conversion rate of fixed-term employment relationships -- 20\% on average -- is strongly predicted by unobserved firms factors and strongly positively correlated with the stated duration of the first contract, a choice that the firm makes before observing the surplus of the match. Seasonality in activity involves a limited (below 20\%) but well-identifiable share of jobs and firms. On the other hand, the use of fixed-term contracts as a buffer to meet flexibility needs is more difficult to characterize: while some firms resort to temporary employment because their revenues are highly volatile, others simply discharge part of their normal business risk onto workers. This may lead to excessive worker turnover. These results have important policy implications for the design and regulation of fixed-term employment contracts.
Firms and the Gender Wage Gap: A Comparison of Eleven Countries, with Antoine Bertheau, Alexander Hijzen, Astrid Kunze and the LinkEED team -- [Nber SI 2025 Gender in the Economy / Labor Studies Talk] -- Draft available soon!
We quantify the role of gender-specific firm wage premiums in explaining the private-sector gender gap in hourly wages using a harmonized research design across 11 matched employer-employee datasets --- ten European countries and Washington State, USA. These premiums explain the gender gap when women are less likely to work at high-paying firms (sorting) or receive lower premiums than men within the same firm (pay-setting). We find that firm wage premiums account for a substantial share of variation in gender wage gaps, ranging from 15 to 32 percent. While both mechanisms matter, sorting is the predominant driver of the firm contribution to the gender wage gap in most countries. Three patterns are broadly consistent: (1) women sorting into lower-paying firms becomes increasingly pronounced with age; (2) women are more concentrated in low-paying firms with a high share of part-time workers; and (3) pay-setting gaps are largest in high-wage firms, where women receive about 90 percent of the rents men receive from firm surplus gains.
Dignity by Decree? The Employment and Wage Effects of Restricting Fixed-Term Contracts, with Matteo Sartori and Giuseppe Grasso
Access to Italian Social Security data through VisitINPS Scholars Program
The Dignity Decree was a 2018 reform aimed at restricting the use of fixed-term contracts in the Italian labor market. We examine the impact of this regulatory intervention on employment and wages. We find negligible disemployment effects and a significant shift in contract composition: firms more exposed to the reform substantially reduced their use of fixed-term contracts, offsetting the decrease with an increase in permanent employment, primarily through the conversion of existing temporary jobs. We further document a sizeable decline in the post-conversion wage for workers transitioning from fixed-term to permanent contracts compared to pre-reform levels.
Employment Protection Legislation and Job Reallocation across Sectors, Firms and Workers, with Pierre Cahuc
Handbook on Labour Markets in Transition (December 2024)