François Fontaine

La réforme du salaire journalier de référence est entrée en vigueur le 1er octobre 2021 dans le cadre d’une refonte globale de l’Assurance chômage en France. Pour les demandeurs d’emploi ayant alterné périodes travaillées et de non-travaillées avant d’accéder à une indemnisation, cette réforme allonge la durée maximale des allocations chômage tout en en réduisant le montant. Cette étude évalue l’impact de cette réforme sur les trajectoires professionnelles, en tenant compte de l’exposition hétérogène des individus à la réforme. Celle-ci dépend directement du temps passé sans emploi entre le premier et le dernier jour travaillé au cours des deux dernières années.

We use administrative data on individual balance sheets in Denmark to document how an individual’s financial position affects job search behavior. We look at the effect of wealth at the entry into unemployment on the exit rate from unemployment as well as the effect on the subsequent match quality. The detailed data allows us not only to distinguish between liquid and illiquid parts, but also to decompose each of them into assets and liabilities. The decomposition of wealth into these four components is key to understanding how wealth affects job finding rates. In particular, we show that liquid assets reduce the probability of becoming re-employed, but we do not see an effect of liquid liabilities or the illiquid wealth components, while interest payments speed up re-employment. The results on subsequent match quality in form of job duration and wages are mixed.

We use comprehensive data from Denmark that merge online job advertisements with a matched employer-employee dataset and a firm-level dataset with information on revenues and value added to study the relationship between vacancy-posting and various firm outcomes. Vacancy-posting is associated with a 4.4 percentage point increase in a firm’s hiring rate and 85% of the additional hiring occurs within two months. The response of hiring from employment is twice as large as the response of hiring from non-employment. Firms that are smaller, low-wage and fast-growing are associated with larger hiring responses and that response materializes faster at larger firms, low-wage firms and fast-growing firms. We also find that separations are associated with subsequent vacancy-posting and this effect is stronger for separations to employment, consistent with replacement hiring and the presence of vacancy chains. Growth in revenue and value added strongly predict vacancy-posting, with negative shocks having a stronger effect than positive shocks and larger shocks having less-than-proportional responses.

We develop a simple theoretical model showing that, by adding to the adjustment costs associated with permanent contracts, local social pressure against dismissals creates an incentive for CEOs to rely on fixed-term contracts, in an attempt to escape social pressure. Using linked employer-employee data, we show that establishments located closer to headquarters have higher shares of fixed-term contracts in hiring than those located further away whenever firms’ headquarters are located in self-centered communities and the CEO not only works but also lives there. We show that these findings can only be explained by local social pressure.