Fourage and Muffels (2009) applied the scarring concept to part time work in Europe. They used fixed effects estimations of the impact of part‐time work in the past 10 years on present wages for panel data from the UK, Germany and the Netherlands. They found evidence for scarring for women in all three countries (wage penalties of 2% to 5% per past part‐time year) and scarring for men in the UK (wage penalty of 5.5% per past part‐time year). Penalties in the UK were even significant for men and women who had returned to full‐time employment for 5 years or more after having worked part‐time strongly suggesting a true scarring effect. In Germany and the Netherlands however, there is no clear evidence of long term scarring.

Interestingly, in the context of Japan there is evidence not only for scarring from a particular type of employment –contingent employment, but evidence that this scarring is worse than scarring caused by searching or non‐searching unemployment (Yu, 2012). In Japan, contingent employment is fixed term employment that may also have irregular or part‐time hours. Contingent employment is of course income generating and may be preferred to unemployment. However, there is the possible long term consequence of the worker being stigmatized as less committed/ less productive, in a context where labor market segmentation is high and full‐time workers are treated very differently to contingent workers. Yu (2012) uses data from the Social Stratification and Social Mobility Survey conducted in 2005 which was not a panel data study but that did collect retrospective labor market histories. His estimations of discrete‐time hazard rate models for entry rates revealed that for only 2.9% of those in contingent employment, did their job lead to full‐ time work within the same firm. For the most part, contingent employment is clearly not a “stepping stone” into full‐time employment. More generally, contingent employment periods reduced the chance of a worker gaining full‐time employment in future even more so than for periods without work. To control for heterogeneity in preferences for contingent work, she used a sample that only included those that had involuntarily separated from full‐ time work before working in contingent employment.

# **_2.4 Labor market scarring in developing countries_**

Given the expansion of scarring research to consider scarring from certain types of employment alongside unemployment scarring, this paper defines the term labor market scarring to include both unemployment scarring and scarring that occurs from specific types of employment such as informal and temporary work. This broader conception of scarring may be useful, particularly in developing countries where strict lines between unemployment (traditionally defined) and certain forms of employment such as informal work or self‐employment, may be misleading. For example, it is still not clear to what extent informal work is voluntary rather than a second best option to the formal sector (Bosch and Maloney, 2010). In any case, there is almost no published research on any of the possible types of labor market scarring in developing countries though there is considerable research on some related labor market issues. For example, Tansel and Tasci (2010) consider 8