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In recent decades, economic policy makers across Europe have sought to increase labour market flexibility by promoting the use of temporary employment. The articles in this Feature provide new results on how fixed-term and agency work contracts affect firm productivity and how the segments of two-tier labour markets interact. This article points to a possible trade-off between efficiency and equity when deregulating labour markets. Taken together, the evidence presented in this Feature suggests that flexible forms of employment can be both a boon and a bane for labour markets and for society as a whole.

To monitor trends in alternative work arrangements, the authors conducted a version of the Contingent Worker Survey as part of the RAND American Life Panel in late 2015. Their findings point to a rise in the incidence of alternative work arrangements in the US economy from 1995 to 2015. The percentage of workers engaged in alternative work arrangements—defined as temporary help agency workers, on-call workers, contract workers, and independent contractors or freelancers—rose from 10.7% in February 2005 to possibly as high as 15.8% in late 2015. Workers who provide services through online intermediaries, such as Uber or TaskRabbit, accounted for 0.5% of all workers in 2015. Of the workers selling goods or services directly to customers, approximately twice as many reported finding customers through off-line intermediaries than through online intermediaries.

In this paper, we study the costs and benefits of the adoption of a policy of free movement of workers. For countries to agree on uncontrolled movements of workers, short-run costs must be outweighed by the long-term benefits of better labor-market flexibility and income smoothing. We show that such a policy is less likely to be adopted when workers are more impatient and less risk-averse, when production technologies display stronger decreasing returns, and when countries trade a significant share of their products.

Labor mobility is the flexibility of workers to walk away from an industry in response to better opportunities. I develop a model in which labor flows make bad times worse for shareholders who are left with capital that is less productive. The model shows that firms face greater operating leverage by providing flexibility to mobile workers. I construct an empirical measure of labor mobility consistent with the model and document an economically significant cross-sectional relation between mobility, operating leverage, and stock returns. I find that firms in mobile industries earn returns over 5% higher than those in less mobile industries.

The growth of precarious work since the 1970s has emerged as a core contemporary concern within politics, in the media, and among researchers. Uncertain and unpredictable work contrasts with the relative security that characterized the three decades following World War II. Precarious work constitutes a global challenge that has a wide range of consequences cutting across many areas of concern to sociologists. Hence, it is increasingly important to understand the new workplace arrangements that generate precarious work and worker insecurity. A focus on employment relations forms the foundation of theories of the institutions and structures that generate precarious work and the cultural and individual factors that influence people's responses to uncertainty. Sociologists are well-positioned to explain, offer insight, and provide input into public policy about such changes and the state of contemporary employment relations.

France and Spain have similar labour market institutions and their unemployment rates were both around 8% just before the Great Recession but subsequently that rate has increased to 10% in France and to 23% in Spain. In this article, we assess the part of this differential that is due to the larger gap between the firing costs of permanent and temporary contracts, and the laxer rules on the use of the latter in Spain. A calibrated search and matching model indicates that Spain could have avoided about 45% of its unemployment surge had it adopted the French employment protection legislation.

Flexicurity, or the integration of labor market flexibility with social security and active labor market policies, has figured prominently in economic and social policy discussions in Europe since the mid-1990s. Such policies are designed to transcend traditional labor-capital conflicts and to form a mutually supportive nexus of flexibility and security within a climate of intensified competition and rapid technological change. International bodies have marketed flexicurity as an innovative win-win strategy for employers and workers alike, commonly citing Denmark and the Netherlands as exemplars of best practice. In this article, we apply a social determinants of health framework to conduct a scoping review of the academic and gray literature to: (a) better understand the empirical associations between flexicurity practices and population health in Denmark and (b) assess the relevance and feasibility of implementing such policies to improve health and reduce health inequalities in Ontario, Canada. Based on 39 studies meeting our full inclusion criteria, preliminary findings suggest that flexicurity is limited as a potential health promotion strategy in Ontario, offers more risks to workers' health than benefits, and requires the strengthening of other social protections before it could be realistically implemented within a Canadian context.

This paper examines the impact of import competition on skill premium and the moderating effect of labor market flexibility on it, using panel data from 30 provinces in China from 2010 to 2019. A dynamic panel threshold model with instrumental variables is employed to address the endogeneity problem and to identify the nonlinear moderating effect of labor market flexibility. The results show the following: (1) Import competition has a promoting effect on skill premium, and this effect declines from eastern to western regions in China. (2) The import competition increases the skill premium through the channels of enhancing regional innovation capacity and promoting industrial upgrading and rationalization. (3) There exists a significant threshold effect in the moderating effect of labor market flexibility. When labor market flexibility surpasses the threshold value of 1.330, the enhancing effect of import competition on the skill premium is alleviated, facilitating labor reallocation and wage adjustment. The integration of labor market flexibility into the globalization–inequality debate extends the existing literature for providing a new understanding of the mechanisms behind the skill premium. The policy implications are that targeted labor market reforms are essential for mitigating wage differentials between skilled and unskilled workers arising from intensified import competition.

Fitting duration models on an inflow sample of jobs in Germany starting in 2002 to 2010, the author investigates the impact of employers’ use of temporary agency work on regular workers’ job stability. In line with dual labor market theory, the author finds that nontemporary jobs are significantly more stable when employers use temporary agency workers. The rise in job stability stems mainly from reduced transitions into nonemployment, suggesting that nontemporary workers are safeguarded against involuntary job losses. The findings are robust to controlling for unobserved permanent employer characteristics and changes in the observational window that comprises the labor market disruption of the Great Recession.

This paper studies the link between volatility, labor market flexibility, and international trade.International differences in labor market regulations affect how firms can adjust to idiosyncratic shocks. These institutional differences interact with sector specific differences in volatility (the variance of the firm-specific shocks in a sector) to generate a new source of comparative advantage.Other things equal, countries with more flexible labor markets specialize in sectors with higher volatility. Empirical evidence for a large sample of countries strongly supports this theory: the exports of countries with more flexible labor markets are biased towards high-volatility sectors. We show how differences in labor market institutions can be parsimoniously integrated into the workhorse model of Ricardian comparative advantage of Dornbusch, Fischer, and Samuelson (1977, American Economic Review, 67,823-839). We also show how our model can be extended to multiple factors of production.