In this paper, we present evidence on how employers perceive labor regulations and react when these are perceived to constrain the operation of their firm. The paper draws from harmonized surveys of (up to) 17,000 firms around the world, and compares employers’ responses with actual labor...

This paper studies the impact of an increase in the enforcement of labor regulations on unemployment and inequality, using city level data from Brazil. We find that stricter enforcement (affecting the payment of mandated benefits to formal workers) leads to: higher unemployment, less income...

This paper reviews the process of job creation and destruction across a sample of 16 industrial and emerging economies over the past decade. It exploits a harmonized firm-level data-set drawn from business registers and enterprise census data. The paper assesses the importance of technological...

There is increasing pressure for the flexibility of labour markets both in current EU member states and candidate countries. The paper aims to estimate the strictness of employment protection regulation, one of the most relevant aspects of labour market flexibility, and the degree of its actual...

Since formal laws can be observed or ignored to varying degrees, the actual enforcement regime shapes incentives and constraints. Most of the studies exploring EPL effects on labour market performance implicitly assume that EPL compliance is near to complete and therefore all firms bear full...

Over the past three decades Germany has repeatedly deregulated the law on temporary agency work by stepwise increasing the maximum period for hiring-out employees and allowing temporary work agencies to conclude fixed-term contracts. These reforms should have had an effect on the employment...

Die Arbeitsmarktreformen von 2003 bis 2005 haben entscheidend zu einer bemerkenswerten Trendumkehr auf dem deutschen Arbeitsmarkt beigetragen und damit auch einen wichtigen Beitrag geleistet, das Land besser auf die Konsequenzen des bevorstehenden demografischen Wandels vorzubereiten. Die...