Reduced activity practices and their impacts on occupational trajectories: a review of the literature.

Summary The reduced activity scheme aims to mitigate the disincentive effects of the unemployment benefit system by allowing jobseekers to combine paid activity and job search while accumulating, at least partially, the remuneration of their activity and their unemployment benefit. Our review of the theoretical and empirical literature seeks to determine whether this system, with incentives necessarily limited to temporary or part-time work, can promote sustainable integration into the labor market. It shows that the expected theoretical effects on the professional trajectories of job seekers and on the quality of jobs potentially found are ambiguous and deserve to be empirically determined. National and international empirical studies show that it is necessary to distinguish between short-term and long-term effects and that there is considerable heterogeneity in the impacts between job seekers. Nevertheless, in France, reduced activity seems to accelerate access to sustainable employment, but with relatively modest effects. Moreover, it does not seem to improve or degrade the quality of the job found.