Following the adoption of information and communication technologies (ICT), firms may react to increasing skill requirements either by training or hiring the new skills, or a combination of the two.Using matched datasets with about 1,000 French plants, we assess the relative importance of these...

Choosing to look at the “public administration of labour” rather than “admin-istered labour”, the author starts by analysing the components of the former which, more than an organic reality, can be defined as an institutional process developing over time. Without denying the importance...

From post-war era beginning until 1956 - the year which the ministry of Labour celebrated the first half-century it had been in existence -, its division for Labour and Employment was a strikingly stable organisation. Nearly each of its high-ranking managers (the assistant principals, the...

This paper addresses a lack of evidence on the impact of performance pay in the public sector by evaluating a pilot scheme of incentives in a major government agency. The incentive scheme was based on teams and covered quantity and quality targets, measured with varying degrees of precision. We...

Over the last two decades the Egyptian labor market has undergone major changes that the social claims of the January 2011 revolution brought to light. Among them, lack of job security and associated weak social protection have been particularly criticized. Therefore the aim of this article is...

The purpose of this paper is to explain why low-wage workers with identical qualifications to higher-wage workers are more exposed to unemployment. Each worker is considered to belong to a social group (defined according to his/her gender, age, and nationality). We assume that workers experience...

We study how French exporters react to a VAT shock in a destination country. As VAT shocks are by nature almost permanent, exogenous, and without impact on marginal costs, the subsequent price reaction makes it possible to identify a pure demand-led mark-up adjustment. The results of an analysis...

Le contrat de travail est une convention par laquelle une personne s'engage à mettre son activité à la disposition d'une autre moyennant rémunération. Depuis une dizaine d'années, les critiques se sont concentrées sur les règles qui encadrent sa rupture. Selon certains économistes, la...