This paper explores the effects of high and low skilled immigration to a hostcountry with unionized low skilled labor and an unemployment insurancescheme. It is shown that the consequences for the labor market and the welfareof natives depend crucially on the host country's production structure....

In this paper we study the joint decision process of changing the structure of jobs and layingoff individual workers in a firm that downsizes its workforce. A hierarchical decision model isproposed and estimated using personnel data from a firm in demise comparing thecharacteristics of the...

This paper examines how a change in the generosity of one social assistance programgenerates spillovers onto other social assistance programs. We exploit an age discontinuityin the stringency of the 1993 Dutch disability reforms to estimate the causal effect of exit fromdisability insurance (DI)...

European Social Survey data on 30 countries, covering years 2004-2009, are used to lookinto joint institutional [and other macro] determinants of the rates of dependent employmentwithout a contract, informal self-employment, and unemployment (secondary jobs are notaccounted for). Consistently...

This chapter reviews the literature on employment and labor law. The goal of the review is tounderstand why every jurisdiction in the world has extensive employment law, particularlyemployment protection law, while most economic analysis of the law suggests that lessemployment protection would...

Using counterfactual microsimulations, Shapley decompositions of time change in inequalityand poverty indices make it possible to disentangle and quantify the relative effect of taxbenefitpolicy changes, compared to all other effects including shifts in the distribution ofmarket income. Using...

The potentially adverse labor market effects of severance pay mandates are a continuingsource of policy concern. In a seminal study, Lazear (1990) found that contract avoidance ofseverance pay firing costs was theoretically simple – a bonding scheme would do – but thatempirically the labor...

A significant fraction of the labor force consists of employed workers who are part-timeunemployed (underemployed) in the sense that they are unable to work as much as theyprefer. This paper develops a search and matching model to study the design of optimalunemployment insurance in an economy...

Using a country-industry panel dataset (EUKLEMS) we uncover a robust empirical regularity,namely that high-risk innovative sectors are relatively smaller in countries with strictemployment protection legislation (EPL). To understand the mechanism, we develop a twosectormatching model where firms...

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