Daehong Kim 

Motivation:  South Korea now has the lowest fertility rate among OECD countries (see Figure (A)), and existing policy interventions have failed to reverse the decline. A growing concern is that the country’s deeply dualized labor market —where many workers remain on precarious fixed-term contracts, one of the highest shares in the OECD (see Figure (B)) — may be a central structural barrier to family formation. Employment uncertainty can raise the perceived costs and risks of marriage and childbearing, potentially delaying or discouraging these decisions. This paper examines whether improving job stability for fixed-term workers can reduce these constraints and increase marriage and fertility rates. Using administrative and survey data, I exploit an unprecedented nationwide Public Sector Employment Reform in 2017 that converted fixed-term workers into permanent positions to identify the causal impact of job security on family-formation outcomes. 

Motivation:  This paper investigates how asymmetric employment protection reforms shaped employment outcomes across Europe. In the 2000s, several countries tightened hiring rules for temporary contracts (EPL for Temp., see Panel (A)), while others relaxed them (see Panel (B)), whereas dismissal protections for permanent workers remained largely unchanged. These uneven adjustments shifted the relative costs of temporary versus permanent employment, creating incentives for firms to substitute between contract types. Using variation in the timing and intensity of these reforms, I provide evidence on their consequences for employment and labor-market duality.

Motivation:  This paper examines how firms respond to binding duration limits on fixed-term contracts (FTCs) in a highly flexible labor market where transitions between contract types are, in theory, relatively easy. I study the UK’s 2002 Fixed-term Regulations, which introduced a four-year cap on successive FTCs while allowing extensions under a broad “objective justification” clause and left permanent-contract protections largely unchanged. Although the reform imposed a new duration limit, overall employment protection in the UK remained among the weakest in Europe, and the protection gap between permanent and fixed-term contracts was comparatively small (lower-left figure). The reform therefore represented only a marginal adjustment within an already highly flexible institutional environment — a point also noted in contemporary commentary (see The Guardian). This setting allows me to test whether such a limited regulatory change, introduced in a context where firms face few constraints on contract decisions, could nevertheless alter their contract-renewal behavior or employment-adjustment margins.