This paper explores the short-term employment effect of deregulating job protection forregular workers and how it varies with prevailing business cycle conditions. We apply a localprojection method to a newly constructed 'narrative' dataset of major regular job protectionreforms covering 26...

I review theories and evidence on labor market policies and institutions in an international context. These include collective bargaining, minimum wages, employment protection laws, unemployment insurance (UI), mandated parental leave, and active labor market policies. Scandinavia and Central...

This paper explores the impact of policies and institutions on employment and unemployment of OECD countries in the past decades. Reduced-form unemployment equations, consistent with standard wage setting/price-setting models, are estimated using cross-country/time-series data from 21 OECD...

There have been concerns that employment-enhancing reforms along the lines of the 1994 OECD Jobs Strategy could inadvertently lead to increased income inequality and poverty. This paper focuses on the impact of institutions and redistributive policies on inequality and poverty with the view of...

We estimate the elasticity of private-sector employment to non-oil GDP in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) for GCC nationals and expatriates using a Seemingly Unrelated Error Correction (SUREC) model. Our results indicate that the employment response is lower for nationals, who have an...

Dube, Lester, and Reich (2010) argue that state-level minimum wage variation can be correlated with economic shocks, generating spurious evidence that higher minimum wages reduce employment. Using minimum wage variation within contiguous county pairs that share a state border, they find no...

This paper evaluates the worker-level effects of a historically large and permanent increase in the minimum wage in Lithuania. Our identification strategy leverages variation in workers’ exposure to the new minimum wage, and exploits the fact that there has been no increase in the minimum...

We quantify the extent to which public-sector employment crowds out private-sector employment using specially assembled datasets for a large cross-section of developing and advanced countries, and discuss the implications for countries in the Middle East, North Africa, Caucasus and Central Asia....

This paper studies the labor market effects of a large employer-borne payroll tax cut for unemployed women, introduced in Italy since 2013. I combine social security data with several empirical approaches, leveraging the time-limited application of the tax scheme and discontinuities in...

This paper estimates and quantifies the impact of structural reforms on per capita income for a large set of OECD and non-OECD countries. The findings suggest that the quality of institutions matters to a large extent for economic outcomes. More competition-friendly regulations, as measured by...