The Use of a French Employment Program Activite Reduite : Determinants and Trajectories of Jobseekers

In France, job seekers have the opportunity to return to a part-time work and retain a part of their unemployment benefits. This program is based on the idea that it would encourage insured jobseekers to resume an occupation even if it is less paid before their registration at the employment agency. We question the logic of this active employment policy whose aim is to make work pay. It should be noted that in France less than half of job seekers receive unemployment compensation. Our goal is to examine the idea that this French program is an incentive to return to a regular employment and if it does not result a lock-in effect (in a precarious path). We seek to understand why the job seekers accept those subsidized temporary jobs and what determines their return to a regular employment. At first, our goal is to study the determinants of using this program according to a quantitative and a qualitative point of view. Our analyze is based on two matched administrative data sets: the FHS from the French Employment Agency, and the FNA (National register of beneficiaries). The FHS allows us to know the registration at job center, the use or not of Activité réduite (AR), the characteristics of AR (duration, hours, wages, …), the individual characteristics of job seekers (gender, age, education, qualification, marital status, number of children,...), place of residence and the characteristics of the previous job registration at job center. We mobilize the FNA because it is important to take into account the status of unemployment benefits, the amount of unemployment benefit and the previous wage. Our goal is to take into account the duration of this subsidized temporary jobs (AR), the time spent in unemployment before and after AR, the status of unemployment benefits and socio-demographic characteristics of job seekers, in order to identify a typology of job seekers who access to this device. Then we analyze the career paths of those different groups of job seekers who used this program or not. To understand the reasons for the use and non-use of this device, our qualitative analysis is based on semi-structured interviews.