This paper studies the impact of an increase in the enforcement of labor regulations on unemployment and inequality, using city level data from Brazil. We find that stricter enforcement (affecting the payment of mandated benefits to formal workers) leads to: higher unemployment, less income...

Enforcement of labor regulations in the formal sector may drive workers to informality because they increase the costs of formal labor. But better compliance with mandated benefits makes it attractive to be a formal employee. We show that, in locations with frequent inspections workers pay for...

This chapter reviews the literature on employment and labor law. The goal of the review is to understand why every jurisdiction in the world has extensive employment law, particularly employment protection law, while most economic analysis of the law suggests that less employment protection...

We study how different levels of protection upon separation affect the labour market behaviour of unmarried cohabiting partners. In Canada, unmarried cohabitation becomes a legal status after one year of relationship. Most provinces automatically expand couples' rights and responsibilities after...

This paper revisits the question of how trade openness affects labor market outcomes in a developing country setting. We explore the fact that plants face varying degrees of exposure to global markets and to the enforcement of labor market regulations, and rely on Brazil's currency crisis in...

How does enforcement of labor regulations shape the labor market effects of trade? To tackle this question, we exploit the Brazilian trade liberalization episode and exogenous variation in the intensity of both the trade shock and enforcement across local labor markets. Regions with stricter...

China's new Labor Contract Law, which intended to strengthen the labor protection for workers, went into effect on January 1, 2008. The law stipulated that the maximum cumulative duration of successive fixed-term (temporary) labor contracts is 10 years, and employees working for the same...

This paper provides a first assessment of the causal impact of the 2018-2021 reform in Korea meant to combat its long working-hour culture. The reform consists of lowering the statutory limit on total weekly working hours from 68 to 52. We apply a difference-in-difference approach in which we...

Empirical investigation of the labor market consequences of employment protection has mushroomed since Lazear's (1990) pioneering study. Having sketched the theoretical background, we chart the course of the modern empirical literature. We focus mainly on dismissals protection, distinguishing...

In this paper we use Portuguese data on individual (multiple) unemployment spells and apply semi-parametric duration models to investigate the effects of different types of disabilities on (re)employment probabilities. We find that disabled persons with muscular, skeletal, geriatric and...