Recent research attempting to understand the behaviour of unemployment, and more generally the labour market itself, has emphasised the need to further our understanding of labour market dynamics. Underlying this approach is the assumption that labour markets are characterised by a constant...

Despite a rapid decrease in unemployment and strong GDP and employment growth, real wages barely increased in Spain over the period 1995-2006. An explanation of this lack of growth may rely on employment composition effects derived from structural changes, such as the rise in the weights of...

We use detailed information on labor earnings and employment from Social Security records to document earnings inequality in Spain from 1988 to 2010. Male earnings inequality was strongly countercyclical: it increased around the 1993 recession, showed a substantial decrease during the 1997-2007...

While Spain has traditionally underperformed its European peers in terms of labor productivity, the trend reverses after 2007. The evolution of aggregate productivity in Spain during the Great Recession is shaped largely, albeit not exclusively, by the adverse conditions in the labor market....

This paper analyzes the joint effect of EPL and financial market imperfections on investment, capital-labour substitution, labour productivity and job reallocation in a cross-country framework. In the spirit of Rajan and Zingales (1998) and Ciccone and Papaioannou (2006), we exploit variation in...

Spain faces the highest unemployment rate among the European Union countries (22.2%), and Portugal the lowest (7.3%). However, superficially, these two countries share common labour market features: they both have the most stringent job security rules in the OECD, the architecture of their...

Spain has had a serious structural unemployment problem for the last 20 years. This paper argues that the interaction of firing costs and job-to-job flows added to changes in unemployment benefits, could provide an explanation for equilibrium unemployment increasing, since 1984. First, we...

In this paper we measure, at sectoral level, the sources of Spanish productivity growth, distinguishing among the roles played by labor productivity, the degree of factor substitution and total factor productivity (Solow residual). In terms of value added, total factor productivity growth in the...

Despite the increasing focus on labour market dynamics, little is known about either the quality of the underlying data or the appropriateness of the standard methodologies frequently used to analyse labour market dynamics in Europe (the retrospective and matched files approaches). This paper is...

Despite the relevance in terms of policy, we still know little in Spain about where and by whom jobs are created, and how that is affecting the size distribution of firms. The main innovation of this paper is to use a rich database that overcomes the problems encountered by other firm-level...