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...

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...

Contrary to standard search model predictions, prior studies failed to estimate a positive effect of unemployment insurance (UI) on reemployment wages. This paper estimates a positive UI wage effect exploiting an age-based regression discontinuity in Austrian administrative data. A search model...

This study examines the determinants of job-finding rates of unemployment benefit recipients under the Chilean program. This is a unique, innovative program that combines social insurance through a solidarity fund (SF) with self-insurance in the form of unemployment insurance savings accounts...

We use three general equilibrium frameworks with jobs and unemployed workers to study the effects of government mandated unemployment insurance (UI) and employment protection (EP). To illuminate the forces in these models, we study how UI and EP affect outcomes when there is higher 'turbulence'...

Two features distinguish European and US labour markets. First, most European countries have a considerably more generous unemployment insurance system. Second, the duration of unemployment and employment spells are substantially higher in Europe – employment turnover is lower. We show that...

Unemployment insurance and employment protection are typically discussed and studied in isolation. ln this paper, we argue that they are tightly linked, and we focus on their joint optimal design in a simple model, with risk averse workers, risk neutral firms, and random shocks to productivity....

We document the presence of a trade-off between unemployment benefits (UB) and employment protection legislation (EPL) in the provision of insurance against labour market risk. Different countries’ locations along this trade-off represent stable, hard to modify, politico-economic equilibria....

We document the presence of a trade-off between unemployment benefits (UB) and employment protection legislation (EPL) in the provision of insurance against labour market risk. The mix of quantity restrictions and price regulations adopted by the various countries would seem to correspond to a...

This paper investigates how the potential duration of unemployment benefits affects the quality of post-unemployment jobs. It takes advantage of a natural experiment introduced by a change in Slovenia’s unemployment insurance law that substantially reduced the potential benefit duration....