This paper investigates the impact of workplace breastfeeding laws on the labor supply of mothers. We exploit a unique setting, when throughout 1998-2009 states in the US introduced laws requiring employers to provide break time and a private room for women to express milk or breastfeed. Our...

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...

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...

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...

Although widely regarded as a textbook case of a rigid economy, in the late 1990s France was able to increase employment by 10 per cent within five years and to cut down unemployment by more than a fourth. This paper investigates what factors may account for this surprising performance. The...

The paper studies wage and employment determination in the Swedish business sector from the mid-1910s to the late 1930s. This period includes the boom and bust cycle of the early 1920s as well as the Great Depression of the early 1930s. The events of the early 1920s are particularly intriguing,...

We exploit the gender-specific components of large-scale labor demand shocks stemming from rising international manufacturing competition to test how shifts in the relative economic stature of young men versus young women affected marriage, fertility and children's living circumstances during...

Labor market institutions, via their effect on the wage structure, affect the investment decisions of firms in labor markets with frictions. This observation helps explain rising wage inequality in the US, but a relatively stable wage structure in Europe in the 1980s. These different trends are...