Laws on hiring and firing are intended to protect workers from unfair behavior by employers, to counter imperfections in financial markets that limit workers' ability to insure themselves against job loss, and to preserve firm-specific human capital. But by imposing costs on firms' adaptation to...

In this paper, we present evidence on how employers in developing and emerging economies perceive employment regulations and react to them. We use harmonized surveys of about 10,800 firms around the world, supplemented by indicators of the stringency of employment protection that summarize...

This paper analyses the impact of employment protection (EP) on the composition of the workforce and worker turnover using a unique firm-level dataset for Italy. The impact of employment protection is analysed by means of a regression discontinuity design (RDD) that exploits the variation in EP...

This note examines the balance of activation strategies in OECD countries, where this type of policy approach has a long tradition. Countries share the objective of strengthening employment and reducing benefit dependency and vulnerability among the working-age population, but the balance of...