The Danish flexicurity model has attracted attention among policymakers in Europe, because it suggests that a flexible labor market can coexist with a generous welfare system to achieve low unemployment. Using a panel of 19 countries over 1960-2002, the paper identifies the elements of the...

Over the last 15 years, the reforms of employment protection legislation (EPL) in European countries have mainly eased hiring and firing restrictions for temporary employment while leaving the strict EPL provisions for regular or permanent contracts unchanged. Recent reforms in France follow...

This paper examines the macroeconomic impact of migration on income convergence in the EU's New Member States (NMS). The paper focuses on cross-border mobility of labor and examines the implications for policymakers with the help of a general equilibrium model. It finds that cross-border labor...

Governments often intervene in labor markets with the aim of reducing inequality and promoting employment. Such intervention often results in wage compression and restrictions on how firms use their workers. This paper investigates the impact of such interventions on the labor market conditions...

Despite improvements in labor market performance over the past decade, owing in part to past reforms, Italy's employment and productivity outcomes continue to lag behind those of its European peers. This paper reviews Italy's institutional landscape and labor market trends from a cross-country...

This paper evaluates European structural reforms over the last 20 years, in light of economic theory predictions about interactions between labor and product market reforms. Reforms in labor markets occur at higher frequencies than in product market, which are, however, more coherent. These...

Real unit labor costs (RULC) growth differentials between euro area members have persisted since EMU began and even widened out in the run-up to the crisis. This paper focuses on the causes underlying such dispersion. According to our empirical findings, persistent RULC growth differentials can...

The paper examines the consequences of fiscal consolidation in times of persistently low growth and high unemployment by estimating medium-term fiscal multipliers during protracted recessions (PR) in a sample of 17 OECD countries. Based on Jorda’s (2005) local projection methodology, we...

We build a small open economy, real business cycle model with labor market frictions to evaluate the role of employment protection in shaping business cycles in emerging economies. The model features matching frictions and an endogenous selection effect by which inefficient jobs are destroyed in...

This paper reviews the literature on the informal economy, focusing first on empirical findings and then on existing approaches to modeling informality within both partial and general equilibrium environments. We concentrate on labour and credit markets, since these tend to be most affected by...