Standard economic analysis holds that labor market rigidities are harmful for job creation and typically increase unemployment. But many orthodox reforms of the labor market have proved difficult to implement because of political opposition. For these reasons it is important to explain why we...

We analyze the political support for employment protection legislation. Unlike my previous work on the same topic, this paper pays a lot of attention to the role of obsolescence in the growth process. In voting in favour of employment protection, incumbent employees trade off lower living...

This paper develops a model of job creation and job destruction in a growing economy with embodied technical progress, that we use to analyze the political support for employment protection legislations such as the ones that are observed in most European countries. We analyze the possibility of...

We analyze the channels by which an ill-functioning labor market changes the preferences of the people for public policy and therefore the decisions that are made. We not only discuss labour market reform but other important aspects of policy making such as the size and structure of government...

In 1990 Colombia replaced its traditional system of severance payments with a new system of severance payments savings accounts (SPSAs). Although severance payments often are justified on the grounds that they provide insurance against earnings loss, they also increase costs for employers and...

The US labor market witnessed two apparently unrelated secular movements in the last 30 years: a decline in unemployment between the early 1980s and the early 2000s, and a decline in participation since the early 2000s. Using CPS micro data and a stock- flow accounting framework, we show that a...

The matching function -a key building block in models of labor market frictions- implies that the job finding rate depends only on labor market tightness. We estimate such a matching function and find that the relation, although remarkably stable over 1967-2007, broke down spectacularly after...

In our analysis we try and recover the wage loss from unemployment in Spain and see how it is affected by previous unemployment experience, unemployment duration, eligibility for unemployment benefits, and previous wages. We also study its variations across groups. Our main conclusion is that...

We find that over the period 1950-1990, US states absorbed increases in the supply of schooling due to tighter compulsory schooling and child labor laws mostly through within-industry increases in the schooling intensity of production. Shifts in the industry composition towards more...

Throughout the 19th century and until the mid-20th century, in terms of long-term investment in human capital and, above all, in education, Spain lagged far behind the international standards and, more specifically, the levels attained by its neighbours in Europe. In 1900, only 55% of the...