Temporary Work in Turbulent Times: The Swedish Experience

By B. Holmlund, D. Storrie. Social Science Research Network, 2002

221 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Sweden has experienced a substantial increase in temporary work over the 1990s, with most of the rise occurring during a severe macroeconomic recession with mass unemployment. By the early 1990s, workers on fixed-term contracts accounted for 10 percent of the number of employees; by the end of the decade they accounted for 16 percent. The paper presents the Swedish institutional setting, documents basic stylised facts about fixed-term contracts, and discusses the causes of their increased prevalence. Our analysis reveals that open-ended and temporary employment exhibit strikingly different cyclical behaviour with temporary employment being more volatile. A recession is associated with an initial decline in temporary employment followed by a sharp rise from the trough to the end of the recession. We argue that the severe recession of the 1990s is a major factor behind the rise in temporary work in Sweden. Adverse macroeconomic conditions make firms more prone to offer fixed-term contracts and workers more willing to accept them.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fcfcd6320088c8904624d83f84af2b84c93e0805

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

Citations in the corpus

This Time It's Different? Youth Labour Markets during ‘The Great Recession’ (2012, unknown): “Of the four substantive papers in the collection, three find negative effects of temporary employment (Blanchard and Landier, 2002; Booth et al., 2002 and Dolado et al., 2002) with only one (Holmlund and Storrie, 2002) suggesting a (partially) positive role.”
Institutions and the prevalence of nonstandard employment (2015, background): “The prevalence of temporary employment fluctuates across economic cycles (e.g. Holmlund and Storrie, 2002 for Sweden; OECD, 2012), particularly in countries where workers on permanent contracts have high levels of dismissal protection (Bentolila and Bertola, 1990; Polavieja, 2006) and temporary…”
Temporary Employment, Job Flows and Productivity: A Tale of Two Reforms (2012, unknown): “…use of temporary contracts easier constitute a reduction in EPL but also create dual or two-tier labour markets (see Dolado et al., 2002, for Spain; Holmlund and Storrie, 2002, for Sweden).2 EPL raises the cost of employing workers and reduces labour demand unless wages fall to cover exactly the…”
Temporary Contracts and Employee Effort (2003, background): “2 See e.g. OECD 1999, Cahuc and Postel-Vinay 2002, Dolado et al. 2002, Holmlund and Storrie 2002, and Blanchard and Landier 2002.”
Hybrid Entrepreneurship (2010, background): “This period coincides with the culmination of an economic boom where the access to venture capital financing and entry rates was at records high in Sweden, the US and elsewhere.”
Wage Dispersion between and within Plants: Sweden 1985-2000 (2007, unknown): “1 This section draws on various sources, in particular Holmlund (2006) and Holmlund and Storrie (2002).”
Internal and external labor markets: a personnel economics approach (2004, background): “One possible contributor to the exit rate patterns in Table 5 is documented by Holmlund and Storrie (2002). They show that there has been an upward trend in the use of temporary workers in Sweden in recent years. This is unlikely to be driving the results in Table 5 because, as Holmlund and Storrie ”
The Incidence of Temporary Employment in Advanced Economies: Why is Spain Different? (2006, background): “The economic context is expected to play a crucial role in determining micro-level strategies through its impact on uncertainty (see, e.g., Holmlund and Storrie, 2002).”
The Impact of Employment Protection Mandates on Demographic Temporary Employment Patterns: International Microeconomic Evidence (2007, unknown): “Indeed, Holmlund and Storrie (2002) find that the recession in Sweden in the 1990s was a major cause of the rise in the incidence of temporary employment there.”