This paper provides an overview of recent research on dual labour markets. Theoretical and empirical contributions on the labour-market effects of dual employment protection legislation are revisited, as well as factors behind its resilience and policies geared towards correcting its negative...

Long-term unemployment reached unprecedented levels in Spain in the wake of the Great Recession and it still affects around 57% of the unemployed. We document the sources that contributed to the rise in long-term unemployment and analyze its persistence using state-of-the-art duration models. We...

This paper analyzes the strikingly different response of unemployment to the Great Recession in France and Spain. Their labor market institutions are similar and their unemployment rates just before the crisis were both around 8%. Yet, in France, unemployment rate has increased by 2 percentage...

This paper presents a case study on reforming a very dysfunctional labor market with a deep insider-outsider divide, namely the Spanish case. We show how a dual market, with permanent and temporary employees makes real reform much harder, and leads to purely marginal changes that do not alter...

We use a unique dataset to estimate the impact of a large credit supply shock on employment in Spain. We exploit marked differences in banks ́health at the onset of the Great Recession. Several weak banks were rescued by the State and they reduced credit more than other banks. We compare...

This paper analyzes the causal impact of dual vocational education and training (VET) on the labor market insertion of youth. Using matched education and social security records, we estimate the causal impact of a major reform that introduced a new dual track, which combines firm- and...

Over the last quarter century, the Spanish unemployment rate has gone from 3.5 per cent to 24 per cent of the labor force, and then back to 13 per cent. In this paper we describe this extraordinary evolution more in detail, discuss the main shocks and institutions behind it, and provide a set of...

Die kleinen und mittelgroßen Unternehmen (KMU) rücken immer stärker ins Zentrum der europäischen und deutschen Wirtschaftspolitik. Die Europäische Union verabschiedete 2008 den Small Business Act, der bessere Rahmenbedingungen für die kleineren Unternehmen schaffen soll. Auch die...

Die Bedeutung der Zeitarbeit hat in Deutschland in den zurückliegenden Jahren kontinuierlich zugenommen. Inwiefern die Nutzung dieses Instruments die Wettbewerbsfähigkeit der betreffenden Unternehmen erhöht, ist Gegenstand der vorliegenden Studie. Für Unternehmen des verarbeitenden Gewerbes...

In der Diskussion über die staatliche Förderung des Breitbandausbaus wird immer wieder die Frage aufgeworfen, ob und in welchem Umfang Unternehmen von neuen Netzen profitieren. Empirische Analysen auf Grundlage von Unternehmensdaten und Daten zur Breitbandverfügbarkeit in Deutschland zeigen,...