Youth Employment Security and Labour Market Institutions: a Dynamic Perspective

The shift of policy focus from job security to employment security that occurred over the last decade requires the adoption of a dynamic perspective on young people's labour market performance. In this paper, we propose new measures of individual employment security based on monthly employment status trajectories, and on the permanence in the job over time. We use these measures to investigate the employment security of young Europeans around five years after they left education. The empirical analysis reveals that almost 40% of job-insecure individuals actually enjoy employment security, i.e. they are able to re-enter in paid employment rapidly after losing their job. It also highlights the still pressing need for policy measures to enhance employment security, in particular for females and low-educated individuals, and the potential positive role of stricter rules on the use of temporary contracts and of active labour market policy expenditures.