Fixed-term Employment Contracts in an Equilibrium Search Model

Fixed-term employment contracts have been introduced in number of European countries as a way to provide flexibility to economies with high employment protection levels. We introduce these contracts into the equilibrium search model in Alvarez and Veracierto (1999), a version of the Lucas and Prescott island model, adapted to have undirected search and variable labor force participation. We model a contract of length J as a tax on separations of workers with tenure higher than J. We show a version of the welfare theorems, and characterize the efficient allocations. This requires solving a control problem, whose solution is characterized by two dimensional inaction sets. For J=1 these contracts are equivalent to the case of firing taxes, and for large J they are equivalent to the laissez-faire case. In a calibrated verion of the model, we find that temporary contracts with J equivalent to three years length close about half of the gap between those two extremes.