Women's labor force participation has rapidly increased in most countries, but mothers still struggle to achieve a satisfactory work-life balance. Childcare allows the primary caregiver, usually the mother, to take time away from childrearing for employment. Family policies that subsidize...

This paper explores the short-term employment effect of deregulating job protection forregular workers and how it varies with prevailing business cycle conditions. We apply a localprojection method to a newly constructed 'narrative' dataset of major regular job protectionreforms covering 26...

Imagine a government confronted with a controversial policy question, like whether it should cut the level of unemployment benefits. Will social welfare rise as a result? Will some groups be winners and other groups be losers? Will the welfare gap between the employed and unemployed increase?...

We estimate the elasticity of private-sector employment to non-oil GDP in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) for GCC nationals and expatriates using a Seemingly Unrelated Error Correction (SUREC) model. Our results indicate that the employment response is lower for nationals, who have an...

We quantify the extent to which public-sector employment crowds out private-sector employment using specially assembled datasets for a large cross-section of developing and advanced countries, and discuss the implications for countries in the Middle East, North Africa, Caucasus and Central Asia....

The fiscal sustainability of state pensions is a central concern of policymakers in nearly every advanced economy. Policymakers have attempted to ensure the sustainability of these programs in recent decades by raising retirement ages. However, there are concerns that keeping older workers in...

Die Erwerbstätigkeit befindet sich in Deutschland auf einem Höchststand. Die Ursachen hierfür sind vielfältig und nicht nur in der vor zehn Jahren verabschiedeten Agenda 2010 zu sehen. Das gestiegene Bildungsniveau, die hohe Erwerbsbeteiligung, demografische Aspekte, die schrittweise...

Die Europäische Kommission hat ein Beschäftigungspaket vorgestellt, das die Erwerbstätigkeit in der EU verbessern und erhöhen soll, aber auch einen Ausweg aus der Krise darstellen könnte. Eine Umsetzung erscheint unrealistisch vor allem, weil die Arbeitsmärkte in der EU stark differieren,...

Japan's potential growth rate is steadily falling with the aging of its population. This paper explores the extent to which raising female labor participation can help slow this trend. Using a cross-country database we find that smaller families, higher female education, and lower marriage rates...

Gains in labor force participation rates in Chile have slowed in recent years. We examine their determinants using a cohort-model analysis. Allowing for both age- and cohort-specific effects in the context of a seemingly unrelated regression equations (SURE) approach, we find that age factors...