In a segmented labor market, theory predicts that employment protection has an asymmetric impact on entry and incumbent wages. We explore a reform that increased the protection of open-ended contracts for a well-defined subset of firms, while leaving it unchanged for other firms. The causal...

This article is an idiosyncratic survey of the insider-outsider theory, describing the vision underlying the theory, and evaluating salient contributions to the literature in the light of this vision. We also indicate what appear to have been dead-ends and red herrings in past research. The...

Germany experienced an even deeper fall in GDP in the Great Recession than the United States, with little employment loss. Employers' reticence to hire in the preceding expansion, associated in part with a lack of confidence it would last, contributed to an employment shortfall equivalent to 40...

Employer mandates and other labor demand/supply shocks typically have small effects on wages and employment. These effects should be more discernible using data on employment transitions and wages among new hires rather than incumbents. The Quarterly Workforce Indicators (QWI) dataset provides...

Over the past few decades, policy makers have considered employer mandates as a strategy for stemming the tide of declining health insurance coverage. In this paper we examine the long term effects of the only employer health insurance mandate that has ever been enforced in the United States,...

In the late nineties, Germany was often seen as a laggard with respect to labor market and welfare state reforms with institutional inertia being reflected in notoriously sluggish employment growth and rising unemployment. Recent years, however, saw a complex sequence of reforms with regard to...

The paper examines the relative effectiveness of two policy proposals in reducing unemployment and working poverty: unemployment vouchers and low-wage subsidies. The unemployment vouchers are targeted exclusively at the unemployed (especially the long-term unemployed) and are provided only for a...

This study shows that the wage premium paid by large firms fell over the past 20 years and that the decline in the size premium has been most pronounced among the least educated work force. Empirical evidence supports several explanations for the decline in the size premium. First, there has...