Employment Choices and Pay Differences between Non-Standard and Standard Work in Britain, Germany, Netherlands and Sweden

This paper analyses two questions. First, how do otherwise similar people across four countries end up in four different employment states: 1) full-time with a regular contract, 2) part-time with a regular contract, 3) fixed term contract full-time or part-time and 4) self-employed? Second, how do wages differ between otherwise similar people between work arrangements in each of the four countries in our analysis? We employ the 1998 wave of household panel data sets namely BHPS for Britain, GSOEP for Germany, OSA for the Netherlands and HUS for Sweden. The reason for analysing and comparing four countries is an interest in policies that may result in different choices for otherwise similar people.<BR> Our multinomial analyses show that the probability of working part time, both for men and women in the Netherlands is much higher other things equal than for men and women in the other three countries. Similarly the probability of being self employed for men in Sweden is much higher than in the other three countries. In Germany, fixed-term workers are conspicuously badly paid compared to fixed-term workers in the other three countries. Furthermore we find part-time workers relatively better paid in Sweden and the Netherlands than in Britain and Germany.