An empirical contribution to the study of employment protection in France.

Summary Since January 2003, part of the employment protection legislation, which was put in place in France in the aftermath of the Second World War in order to guarantee the respect of the right to work, is in abeyance and will have to be modified by July 2005. The thesis is an empirical contribution to the debate on this reform and focuses on one of the pillars of this debate, the cleavage between fixed-term and open-ended contracts. Two main aspects are examined. On the one hand, it is a question of evaluating the costs associated with job protection, i.e. the hiring and firing costs borne by companies. Second, because fixed-term contracts can be used both to select the workforce and to adjust the productive workforce to the business cycle, we study the impact of employment protection on the long-term career prospects of fixed-term workers.