This paper utilizes a comprehensive worker-firm panel for the Netherlands to quantify the impact of ICT capital-skill complementarity on the finance wage premium after the Global Financial Crisis. We apply additive worker and firm fixed-effect models to account for unobserved worker- and firm-heterogeneity and show that firm fixed-effects correct for a downward bias in the estimated finance wage premium. Our results indicate a sizable finance wage premium for both fixed- and full-hourly wages. The complementarity between ICT capital spending and the share of high skill workers at the firm-level reduces the full-wage premium considerably and the fixed-wage premium almost entirely.

In this paper, we use comprehensive employer-employee data for the Netherlands to investigate the labor income effects of flexible labor contracts in two different settings, wage determination as in the AKM model, and an analysis of earnings losses after job displacement. In both settings, we find that flexible contracts lead to lower wages, but that workers with flexible contracts primarily earn less because they work at or join lower paying firms. This implies that the negative effects of flexible contracts on wage income are overstated, if firm-specific pay differentials are not taken into account.

In this paper, I argue that labor market flexibility, through flexible jobs, serves as an important policy tool for stabilizing the economy. Motivated by the empirical evidence, I build a tractable heterogeneous-agent version of the New Keynesian model in which regular and flexible jobs coexist. I then estimate the model using Bayesian techniques to match salient features of the European labor market and argue that the interaction between incomplete markets and the lower unemployment risk fluctuations associated with a labor market with flexible jobs generates a qualitatively important stabilization effect on the economy.