Abstract

For a larger portion of society, working life becomes a continuing sequence of short employment and unemployment spells. The aim of this empirical paper using three waves of the European Community Household Panel (1994-1996) is to acquire a deeper insight into the flows on the labour market and the factors that might be responsible for the great variations in these employment patterns between individuals and households both within and across countries. The focus will be especially on longitudinal patterns of employment according to the attachment of the person to the labour market in a given period of time. These longitudinal employment patterns are called working profiles and it is claimed that these profiles provide a better insight into modern labour markets because of their focus on the dynamics or changes of employment and unemployment status over time. We use an amended version of Esping-Andersen's welfare state typology to test whether longitudinal employment patterns differ across these regimes according to the typical institutional set-ups of their labour market and social security policies. We added a Southern regime type because we found that the classification including such a regime type performs better in explaining differences in longitudinal employment patterns across Europe than one without it. Within a job search theoretical framework we estimated some multinomial logit models to test whether indeed regime types matter in explaining transitions in longitudinal employment statuses over time. The results show that regimes matter and that the Southern regime performs markedly different compared to the other three regime types.