During the last two decades many EU countries have reformed the set of legal rules that regulate dismissals. In contrast with other institutional reforms of the labour market, there seems to be a common strategy of maintaining strict employment protection legislation for workers under the...

Temporary employment contracts allowing unrestricted dismissals were introduced in Spain in 1984 and quickly came to account for most new jobs. In 1997, however, the Spanish government attempted to reduce the incidence of temporary employment by reducing payroll taxes and dismissal costs for...

In Portugal real wage flexibility, at the macroeconomic level, is noticeably higher, while unemployment duration is lower, when compared to Spain. This suggests that the hardship of being unemployed is higher in Portugal. Unemployment benefits and family insurance, which are the main buffer...

This paper considers a matching model with heterogeneous jobs (unskilled and skilled) and workers (low- and high-educated) which allows for on-the-job search by mismatched workers. The latter are high-educated workers who transitorily accept unskilled jobs and continue to search for skilled...

In many countries, Employment Protection Legislation (EPL) establishes different regulations for certain groups of workers who face more disadvantages in the labour market (young workers, women, unskilled workers, etc.) with the aim of improving their employability. Well-known examples are the...

This paper examines the empirical evidence regarding the poor performance of the youth labour market in Spain over the last two decades, which entails very high unemployment for both higher and lower educated workers, symptoms of over-education, and low intensity of on-the-job training. It also...