Today, Europe is a continent of low participation, low employment labor markets. Many observers would like to blame poor employment outcomes on the Euro or on austerity. But these are dangerous distractions from real problems that constitute imperatives for structural reform. There are...

We study the restructuring of the labor force after mergers and acquisitions. Overall restructuring is large. Net employment of targets declines by more than half within two years after acquisitions relative to a matched sample, and is concentrated in targets that close all establishments. There...

Labour market segmentation currently is at the forefront of national and European policy debates. While the European Commission and the OECD try to promote what they see as more inclusive policies, academic observers remain skeptical. Particularly the dualisation literature points to stable...

In many economies, there is substantial economic activity in the informal sector, beyond the reach of government policy. Labor market policies, which by definition apply only to the formal sector, can have important spillover effects on the informal sector. The relative sizes of the informal and...

We provide new evidence on the effectiveness of West German labour market programmes by evaluating training and employment programmes that have been conducted 2000-2002 after the first large reform of German labour market policy in 1998. We employ exceptionally rich administrative data that...

In 2012, a labour market reform in Italy known as the Fornero Law substantially reduced firing restrictions for open-ended contracts in the case of firms with more than 15 employees. The results from a difference in regression discontinuities design that compares firms below versus those above...

Contrary to the predictions of the insider-outsider model, we show that the large majority of outsiders in developing countries support, rather than oppose, protective labour regulations. This evidence holds across countries in different regions, across different types of protective labour...

We study whether segmented labor markets with flexibility at the margin (e.g., just affecting fixed-term employees) can achieve similar volatility than fully deregulated labor markets. Flexibility at the margin produces a gap in separation costs among matched workers that cause fixed-term...

It has been recently argued that the informal sector of the labor market in a developing economy shows a dual structure with one part of it being competitive to the formal sector and another part being the result of market segmentation. To test this hypothesis we formulate an econometric model...