Two stylized representations are often found in the academic and policy literature oninformality and formality in developing countries. The first is that the informal (or unregulated)sector is more competitive than the formal (or regulated) sector. The second is that contractenforcement is...

We estimate the effects of labor market entry conditions on wages for male individuals firstentering the Austrian labor market between 1978 and 2000. We find a large negative effect ofunfavorable entry conditions on starting wages as well as a sizeable negative long-run effect.Specifically, we...

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...

About one in four workers challenges her dismissal in front of a labor court in France. Using adata set of individual labor disputes brought to French courts over the years 1996 to 2003,we examine the impact of labor court activity on labor market flows. First, we present asimple theoretical...

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...

Building a model with three imperfect markets – goods, labor and credit – representing aproduct’s life-cycle, we find that goods market frictions drastically change the qualitative andquantitative dynamics of labor market variables. The calibrated model leads to a significantreduction in...

Unemployment may depend on equilibrium in other markets than the labor markets. Thispaper adresses this old idea by introducing search frictions on several markets: in a model ofcredit and labor market imperfections as in Wasmer and Weil (2004), I further introducesearch on the goods market. The...

This paper assesses the impact of product market competition on job instability as proxied bythe use of fixed-term labor contracts. Using both worker data from the Spanish Labor ForceSurvey and firm data from the Spanish Business Strategies Survey, I show that job instabilityrises with...

This paper documents a robust empirical regularity: in the long-run, higher trade openness iscausally associated to a lower structural rate of unemployment. We establish this fact using:(i) panel data from 20 OECD countries, (ii) cross-sectional data on a larger set of countries.The time...

This paper argues that changes in the returns to occupational tasks have contributed tochanges in the wage distribution over the last three decades. Using Current PopulationSurvey (CPS) data, we first show that the 1990s polarization of wages is explained bychanges in wage setting between and...