Factors Influencing Indian Manufacturing Firms’ Decision to Hire Contract Labour

The study attempts to investigate the factors affecting a firm’s decision to hire contract workers. The information from a specially commissioned survey of manufacturing firms undertaken in 2014 by ICRIER, as part of a World Bank funded project ‘Jobs and Development: Creating Multi-Disciplinary Solutions’. The survey covered 500 firms in five states, namely Haryana, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Gujarat and spread across five major industries; viz. Auto Components, Electronics and Electrical Equipment, Leather Products, Textile and Garments and Food Processing. The estimation is carried out using a logit model, where the firm’s decision, whether or not to hire a contract worker is assumed to be a binary dependent variable.