From temporary employment contracts to labor market insertion: three microeconometric applications to the employment survey.

Summary The insertion of individuals on temporary work contracts (CTT) into the French labor market is a complex process that this thesis aims to examine. The first part studies the determinants of the use of temporary work contracts. The literature shows that CTTs are solutions to problems related to anti-selection, moral hazard, matching and finally uncertainty affecting the external environment of the firm. The results of the estimations based on the historical employment survey confirm the positive effect of contracting costs mentioned in the literature. The second part of the paper aims to test whether a CTT could be a springboard to an open-ended contract. Using a sample of the Employment survey, the results show that, for both men and women, the probability of transition to an open-ended contract decreases after the 12th month. After a CTT in the public sector, compared to the private sector, temporary workers tend to be unemployed or on another CTT. The third part of the thesis analyzes the impact of individual transitions from a fixed-term contract to a permanent contract on wages. We present a model to interpret the transition from a temporary to a permanent job based on a tournament mechanism. The equilibrium properties of the model show that the wage differential between permanent and fixed-term contracts is positively correlated with the uncertainty that accompanies selection into the fixed-term status. Using the Employment survey and using the size of the firm as a proxy for uncertainty, our results confirm that an increase in uncertainty during selection leads to a reinforcement of the wage gap between promoted and non-promoted.