In most industrialized countries, temporary and non-standard forms of employment have become a pervasive feature of the labor market. At the firm level, however, their diffusion is less uniform than expected. While some firms exhibit high propensity to use non-standard labor, others make no use of it. The most conventional explanations (market uncertainty, production regimes, competitive pressure) fail to account for such heterogeneity. In this article, the authors develop an alternative explanation that links non-standard employment to the firm-specific availability of managerial resources: Whenever the latter are relatively scarce, firms make larger use of non-standard labor to reduce coordination and operating costs. Using a linked employer–employee panel of manufacturing firms from the Emilia-Romagna region (Italy), the authors provide empirical support for this explanation. The result is robust to different estimation strategies and controlling for alternative drivers of non-standard employment. This finding suggests that the use of non-standard labor is motivated by the firm’s needs to compensate for specific managerial scarcities.

在大多数工业化国家中，临时和非标准形式的就业形式已成为劳动力市场的普遍特征。但是，在企业层面，它们的扩散不如预期的均匀。尽管有些公司显示出使用非标准劳动力的强烈倾向，但其他公司却没有使用它。最常规的解释（市场不确定性，生产制度，竞争压力）无法解释这种异质性。在本文中，作者提出了另一种解释，将非标准就业与企业特定的管理资源联系起来：只要后者相对稀缺，企业就会更多地利用非标准劳动力来减少协调和运营成本。利用来自艾米利亚-罗马涅地区（意大利）的制造企业的雇主与雇员的联系小组，作者为这种解释提供了经验支持。结果对于不同的估计策略和控制非标准就业的替代驱动因素具有鲁棒性。这一发现表明，非标准劳动力的使用是由公司补偿特定管理稀缺的需求所驱动的。