Using cross-country time series panel regressions for the last two decades, this paper seeks to identify the main policy and institutional factors that explain the share of self-employment across European countries. It looks at the aggregate share of self-employed as well as its breakdown by...

The past couple of decades have seen a huge increase in research on various labor market institutions. This paper offers a brief overview and discussion of research on the labor market impacts of minimum wages (MW), unemployment insurance (UI), and employment protection legislation (EPL). It is...

The economics of crime has emerged as a critical field over the past 30 years, with economists increasingly exploring the causes and consequences of criminal behavior. This chapter surveys key contributions and developments from labor economists, who investigate the (often two-way) intersection...

We adapt the models of Menzio and Moen (2010) and Snell and Thomas (2010) to consider a labour market in which firms can commit to wage contracts but cannot commit not to replace incumbent workers. Workers are risk averse, so that there exists an incentive for firms to smooth wages. Real wages...

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 studies collective contests with endogenous cost sharing, general effort costs and intra-group heterogeneity of prize-valuation. Our objective is to clarify the relationship between cost sharing, intra-group heterogeneity within the competing groups and the elasticity of the marginal...

We use the UK Labor Force survey to investigate whether the socio-economic outcomes of people born on the 13th day of the month, and of those born on Friday the 13th, differ from the outcomes of people born on more auspicious days. In many European countries, including the UK, such days are...

In this paper, we show that the wage assimilation of immigrants is the result of the intricate interplay between individual skill accumulation and dynamic equilibrium effects in the labor market. When immigrants and natives are imperfect substitutes, increasing immigrant inflows widen the wage...

We study empirically how various labor market institutions - (i) union density, (ii) unemployment benefit remuneration, and (iii) employment protection - shape fiscal multipliers and output volatility. Our theoretical model highlights that more stringent labor market institutions attenuate both...

We study the effects of a voluntary skill certification scheme in an online freelancing labour market. We show that obtaining skill certificates increases freelancers' earnings. This effect is not driven by increased freelancer productivity but by decreased employer uncertainty. The increase in...