The implicit contracts of mutual insurance in the labor market.

Summary After having questioned the specificities of the "commodity" of labor, and of the associated market, we conclude that the particular contracts that are concluded there rest entirely on the nature of these specificities. But these specificities do not appear explicitly in the labor contract. This is because they are entirely in the hands of the contracting parties themselves: they are malleable by them, they can disguise them, hide them... . In terms of insurers, they are a source of moral hazard. The labor market has, in fact, imagined a certain number of implicit insurances (implicit contracts, in the etymological sense) which allow each of the contractors to cover themselves against this moral risk. However, the counterpart of these hedges is a series of sub-optimalities: unemployment, segmentation of the labor market, etc. . We show, using a panel of sectors, that this thesis is true in the French case.