This paper discusses the specificities of the labor market for older workers. It discusses the implications of those specificities for the effect of labor market institutions on the employability of those workers. It shows that while unemployment benefits indexed backwards and hiring costs are...

This paper formulates a discrete-time model to study the effects of firing costs on labour demand by a firm facing linear adjustment costs under serially independent productivity shocks. We show that a rise in firing costs reduces the firm's marginal propensities to hire and fire, and may...

A model of the labour market under firing restrictions and endogenous quits is constructed. It is shown that in the spirit of Blanchard and Summers (1988), the model can generate multiple equilibria, with a low-quits/high-unemployment equilibrium coexisting with a high-quits/low-unemployment...

This paper empirically explores the political-economic determinants of why governments choose to tax or subsidize trade in agriculture. We use a new data set on nominal rates of assistance (NRA) across a number of commodities spanning the last four decades for 64 countries. NRAs measure the...

This paper argues that further moves to liberalize trade and to implement existing GATT disciplines may have a greater impact on global competition than the pursuit of harmonized multilateral competition policy disciplines. It also suggests that current GATT rules and case law provide scope for...

Trade liberalization is often met with sharp opposition. Recent examples include the so-called ‘Bolkestein’ directive, which allows service providers from a given EU member to temporarily work in another member country. One way to view such a reform is that it simply widens the range of...

This paper surveys the major options that have been proposed concerning a possible agreement on trade-related anti-trust principles and evaluates both their desirability and feasibility. Three criteria are used to evaluate the options: (i) the extent to which they enhance the contestability of...

This paper discusses what could be done to expand services trade and investment through a multilateral agreement in the WTO. A distinction is made between market access liberalization and the regulatory preconditions for benefiting from market opening. We argue that moving forward on...

WTO members are starting to consider whether and how to develop multilateral disciplines on competition policies. These discussions are taking place in the absence of concerted efforts to compile comparable information on the conditions of competition existing on member country markets. We argue...

Actual and potential competition is a powerful source of discipline on the pricing behavior of firms with market power. A simple model is developed that shows that the effects of import competition and domestic entry regulation on industry price-cost markups depend on country size. Barriers to...