This paper provides a critical view of the cross country literature on the impact of labour market institutions and … policies on the evolving pattern of unemployment in OECD countries. Such widely used indicators as the generosity of … unemployment insurance or the strength of trade unions are neither strongly correlated individually with unemployment nor …

the employment performances of those countries. Moreoever, these institutions act asymmetrically along the business cycle …

impact of labour market institutions from 1960 to 1994. The main contribution of the paper is to show that labour market …. These results are consistent with the findings of a companion paper (Nickell et al., 2001) where the effects of institutions … on unemployment are examined. The model controls for macroeconomic shocks, and include the possibility of interactions …