Panel Paper:
Working Poverty Among Labor Market Outsiders: A Risk-Based Approach to Cross-National Heterogeneity
Tuesday, July 30, 2019
40.002 - Level 0 (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)
*Names in bold indicate Presenter
The insecurely employed and underemployed seldom enjoy statutory entitlements and social benefits, making them highly vulnerable to welfare loss and working poverty. Notably, similar forms of atypical employment carry different economic risks across labor markets. It is crucial to account for this heterogeneity in order to study meaningfully labor market outsiders in a comparative framework. Here we introduce and test a risk-based approach that accounts for variation in outsiders’ economic risk. First, we estimate working poverty rates among the atypically employed based on EU-SILC Microdata and show that atypical employment implies heterogeneous rates of working poverty across labor markets. Second, we test the validity of our risk-based approach and show that the risk of working poverty meaningfully predicts feelings of economic insecurity, internal political efficacy and electoral turnout. Together, the results lend support to the need to account for cross-national variation in the economic risks experienced by labor market outsiders.
