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 -...

Why should floors be set under wages and working conditions by labour market regulations? This paper finds that efficiency arguments are questionable, because of the disemployment effects of strict regulation. Regulation is better explained in terms of the choices of the employed semi- and...

Perhaps it does. We propose a model in which workers with little education or in the tails of the age distribution - the inexperienced and the old - have more chance of job failure (mismatch). Recruits’ average education should then increase and the standard deviation of starting age decrease...

We study the impact of the Austrian Employment Act for the Disabled which grants extended employment protection, requires a hiring quota for firms, and subsidizes the employment of severely disabled (SD) workers. Using a large sample of eligible individuals we compare workers before and after...

This paper provides a critical review of the recent empirical evidence on the links between regulations affecting the hiring and firing of workers, labour reallocation and productivity growth. It also reviews how workers affected by labour mobility fare and discusses policy options to support...

This paper presents and discusses new data on employment protection legislation (EPL) in the successor states of the former USSR – the CIS and Baltic states – over 25 years from 1985 to 2009. We use the OECD methodology (OECD EPL, version II) for assessing the strictness of national labor...

Insider-outsider theory suggests that in dual labour markets two groups have opposing preferences regarding protection against dismissals: insiders defend employment protection, because it increases their rents. Outsiders see it as a mobility barrier and demand deregulation. Similar divides are...

In this paper, I analyze the pros and cons of implementing structural reforms of the labor market in booms vs. recessions, in light of considerations of social efficiency, political viability, and macroeconomic fine tuning. While the optimal timing of a reform depends on the relative importance...

Using manufacturing data for India, this paper studies the economic effects of legal amendments on two types of labor laws: employment protection and labor dispute resolution legislation. We find that laws that increase employment protection or the cost of labor disputes substantially reduce...