The Annual Employment Mix of Workers and Firms, and the Part-Time Earnings Gap in New Zealand

In this paper we document patterns of annual employment across jobs, workers and firms, and examine the relationship between these patterns and job-level earnings rates using data from Statistics New Zealand's Linked Employer-Employee Database (LEED).

First, we characterise workers' annual employment along the intensive (or full-time, within month) and extensive (or full-year, across months) dimensions, and firms' mix of full-time and full-year jobs. We use this characterisation to describe the nature of employment matching between workers and firms, and find that part-time workers are over-represented in firms with a lot of part-time work.

Second, we examine the relationship between the intensive and extensive margin characteristics of jobs and their earnings. Although there is a strong raw earnings penalty associated with part-time jobs, we estimate only a modest direct part-time impact on earnings after controlling for other worker and firm factors; and we estimate a part-year earnings premium.

Citation

Hyslop, Dean and David C. Maré. 2010. "The Annual Employment Mix of Workers and Firms, and the Part-Time Earnings Gap in New Zealand", Australian Journal of Labour Economics, 13:3, pp. 331-52.