Many governments extend the coverage of collective agreements to workers and employ- ers that were not involved in their bargaining. These extensions may address coordination issues but may also distort competition by imposing sector-specific minimum wages and other work conditions that are not...

Fixed-term contracts (FTCs) may be an important tool to promote employment, particularly in recessions or when permanent contracts are costly. Therefore, it may be useful to vary some of the legal parameters of FTCs over the business cycle, namely increasing their flexibility during downturns....

In 2012, a new law allowed firms in Portugal to reduce the overtime premium paid by half. Until then, as in other countries, premiums were subject to a minimum level. We analyse matched panel data, including worker-level (base and overtime) hours and pay, to study the effects of the resulting...

Politicians can use the public sector to give jobs to cronies, at the expense of the efficiency of those organisations and general welfare. In this paper, we regress monthly hires across all firms in Portugal with some degree of public ownership on the country's 1980-2018 political cycle. We...

Social partners (trade unions and employers' associations) shape labour institutions and economic and social outcomes in many countries. In this paper, we argue that, when examining social partners' representativeness, it is important to consider both affiliation and dissimilarity measures. The...

While trade unions have been studied in detail, there is virtually no economics research on employer associations (EAs), trade unions' counterparts in many countries. However, besides conducting collective bargaining, EAs perform several other activities that can in uence economic outcomes,...

The increasing range and quality of China’s exports is a major development internationally with potentially far-reaching effects. In this paper, on top of the direct labour market effects of imports from China studied in previous research, we also measure the indirect effects stemming from...

Education can generate important externalities that contribute towards economic growth and convergence. In this paper, we study the drivers of such externalities by conducting the first meta-analysis of the social returns to education literature. We analyse over 1,000 estimates from 31 articles...

The growth of novel flexible work formats raises a number of questions about their effects upon health and the potential public policy implications. However, answering these questions is hampered by data and identification constraints. This is the first paper that draws on comprehensive...

Employee representatives in firms are a potentially key but not yet studied source of the impact of unions and works councils. Their actions can shape multiple drivers of firm performance, including collective bargaining, strikes, and training. This paper examines the impact of union rep...