J63 - Labor Turnover; Vacancies; LayoffsReturn

We analyze age-specific labor market dynamics in the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia over the period 2009-2012. We document a marginalized status of young workers aged 16-24, whose risk of job loss followed by unemployment is two to three times higher than that of prime-age workers (35-49). Further more, unemployed workers aged 50-61 face relatively the lowest probability of finding a job, at rates 30-50% lower than prime-age unemployed workers. These results are qualitatively in line with those established for the reference economy of the UK. Finally, we find that fluctuations in age-specific unemployment rates in all three countries are mainly driven by variations in outflow rates from unemployment rather than by variations in inflow rates into unemployment. In contrast, in the UK, the fluctuations in all age-specific unemployment rates, are decisively affected by variations in inflow rates into unemployment.

In the global world, the special focus of the paper is on the potential effects of foreign ownership on job and employee flows during the recent economic crisis. The initial hypothesis is that the foreignowned economic subjects may be more often subject to the excessive negative effect caused by the economic downturn compared with those of domestic ownership. Keeping this in mind, we quantify the extended set of employment indicators concerning job creation and job destruction as well as hires and separations according to the ownership of the economic subjects running their businesses in the Czech Republic in the period 2007-2010 and discuss which economic subjects have suffered the consequences of the current crisis. The results show that job destruction varied more than job creation which corresponds to cyclical asymmetry investigated by previous studies.

In this paper we explore how unemployment benefits and other social benefits affect work incentives in the Czech Republic. We test the link between replacement rates and reservation wages taking duration of unemployment into account and we specify validity of the outlined model using replacement rates and reservation wages recognised in the sample of the unemployed. We conclude that replacement rates are high only in case of specific family types (incomplete families and families with children where women have lost the job), low skilled categories of the unemployed. Reservation wages are linked mainly to the economic and social status of the unemployed and seem to be raised by replacement rates of benefits only with the category of the unskilled. Besides low efficiency of job search, insecurity of job tenure and insecurity of future benefits entitlements raise the price of the status of the unemployed and push reservation wages up.