The authors investigate the impact of a change in employment protection laws in Portugal that increased the maximum legal duration of fixed-term contracts. They find that this reform led to a reduction in the probability that a worker on a fixed-term contract would be converted to a permanent contract. In addition, those workers who had their contracts converted experienced a significantly higher hourly wage growth at the time of conversion and faced a lower reduction in wage growth during the years in which the changed legislation was in force. Consequently, the implementation of this law led to a 27% increase in the wage-growth differential between the two contracts. The findings are based on an endogenous regime-switching model using rich administrative linked employer–employee data.
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