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...

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...

We study compensation packages in family and non-family firms. Using matched employeremployeedata for a representative sample of French establishments, we first show thatfamily firms pay on average lower wages to their workers. We find that part of this wage gapis due to differences in...

What makes the entrepreneurial personality is the key question we seek to answer in thespecial issue of the Journal of Economic Psychology on “Personality and Entrepreneurship”.The contributions are clustered around questions regarding the linkage between personality,socio-economic factors...

The “Great Recession” resulted in many business closings and foreclosures, but what effectdid it have on business formation? On the one hand, recessions decrease potential businessincome and wealth, but on the other hand they restrict opportunities in the wage/salary sectorleaving the net...

We develop entrepreneurship and institutional theory to explain variation in different types ofentrepreneurship across individuals and institutional contexts. Our framework generateshypotheses about the negative impact of higher levels of corruption, weaker property rightsand especially...

A personal bankruptcy law that allows for a “fresh start” after bankruptcy reduces theindividual risk involved in entrepreneurial activity. On the other hand, as risk shifts to creditorswho recover less of their credit after a debtor’s bankruptcy, lenders may charge higherinterest rates or...

In this paper we will look at job creation and destruction in firms. We will answer the questionif it is the large companies that create jobs, while the smaller companies are contributingmuch less. Or is it the young companies that create jobs? And who destroys the most jobs?In the crisis...

Experimental evidence reveals that there is a strong willingness to trust and to act in bothpositively and negatively reciprocal ways. So far it is rarely analyzed whether these variablesof social cognition influence everyday decision making behavior. We focus on entrepreneurswho are permanently...