Minimum Hours Constraints: The Role of Organizational Practices

This study examines why firms differ in their policies toward part-time employment. It proposes a firm-level measure of minimum hours constraints (MHC) that accounts for employees' observable characteristics and their expected probabilities of working part-time. The measure is applied to linked employee-employer data from the Structure of Earnings Survey for 19 European countries in 2010, 2014, and 2018. The empirical analysis documents variation in MHC across and within economic sectors, which suggests a significant role of firm-specific policies. To assess the role of firms’ organizational practices, the study analyzes the correlation between the MHC faced by core personnel and by administrative workers. The results indicate that, across economic sectors and countries, non-administrative workers are more likely to face MHC in firms where administrative workers face more rigid MHC. The original Structure of Earnings Survey microdata are confidential Eurostat scientific-use files and cannot be redistributed. The replication package therefore contains a compact synthetic employee-level SES dataset with the variable structure required by the Stata code. At the journal's request, the dataset retains a subset of the original anonymized firm identifiers. No employee-level values or other firm characteristics are copied from the confidential records; all remaining variables are generated from random draws. Working time is assigned independently across employees and firms, and the synthetic data contain no mechanism designed to generate the relationships examined in the paper. The package includes an analysis-ready country-year-sector EU Labour Force Survey auxiliary file and the Stata scripts used for data preparation, construction of firm-level measures (02_deriving_firm_level_data.do), regressions, statistical decompositions, tables, and figures. The synthetic dataset can be used to inspect and execute the analytical workflow, but its results have no substantive interpretation and are not expected to reproduce the numerical estimates reported in the paper. Exact numerical replication requires authorized access to the original Eurostat SES microdata. Further information on software requirements, data access, file contents, and execution is provided in README.md.