Against the background of the current discussion on the introduction of statutory minimum wages in Germany, this paper analyzes the potential employment and fiscal effects of such a policy. Based on estimated labor demand elasticities obtained from a structural labor demand model, the empirical...

Perhaps no other country in recent years has witnessed greater change in its collective bargaining framework than the UK. This paper describes the dramatic developments and their consequences. Like Gaul, it is in three parts. The first part charts the six major pieces of legislation -...

In order to address the impact of regulation on ethical concerns of consumers, we study the effect of a minimum wage. In our experimental market, consumers have monopsony power, firms engage in Bertrand competition, and workers are passive recipients of a wage payment. Two treatments are...

Having faced high unemployment rates for more than a decade, the German government implemented a comprehensive set of labour market reforms during the period 2003-2005. This paper describes the economic and institutional context of the German labour market before and after these so-called Hartz...

We propose a simple, distribution-free method for pooling synthetic control case studies using the mean percentile rank. We also test for heterogeneous treatment effects using the distribution of estimated ranks, which has a known form. We propose a cross-validation based procedure for model...

This paper evaluates the impact on temporary agency workers’ job satisfaction of a reform that considerably changed regulations covering the temporary help service sector in Germany. We isolate the causal effect of this reform by combining a difference-in-difference and matching approach and...

This paper assesses the impact that the 2009 Great Recession had on individual's transitions to and from unemployment in Ireland. The rate of transition from unemployment to employment declined between 2006 and 2011, while the rate from employment to unemployment increased. The impact of some of...

This paper provides novel evidence on the causal effect on female employment of labor market deregulation by using the 1985 amendments to the Labor Standards Law (LSL) in Japan as a natural experiment. The original LSL of 1947 prohibited women from working overtime exceeding two hours a day; six...

This paper investigates the relationship between political instability and labor market institutions. We develop a theoretical model in which some features of the political process, by reducing the future yields of policy interventions, induce an incumbent government to choose labor market...

There is limited empirical evidence on whether unrestricted cash social assistance to poor pregnant women improves children's birth outcomes. Using program administrative micro-data matched to longitudinal vital statistics on the universe of births in Uruguay, we estimate that participation in a...