This paper provides a critique of Faccini (2014) that allegedly shows that temporary contracts lead to lower unemployment in Europe. Using Faccini's data and his estimation methods, we show that the Fixed Effects estimation results collapse when we make slight alterations in the sample size or...

Over the last year the German government has introduced a comprehensive set of labor market policy reforms, the so-called Hartz reforms, which aim at a significant reduction of unemployment. To this end, (a) many of the existing instruments of active labor market policy are modified...

In this paper we analyse how labour market institutions and technology affect wagedetermination through rent sharing. To this aim we first extend the theoretical frameworkof Estevao and Tevlin (2003) to account for heterogeneity of labour (regular and non-regularworkers). The predictions of the...

How do labour market policies influence employment's responsiveness to output fluctuations (employment-output elasticity)? We revisit this question on a panel of OECD countries, which also incorporates the period of the Great Recession. We distinguish between passive and active labour market...

We examine the determinants of differences across countries and over time in the distribution of personal incomes in the OECD. The Gini coefficient of personal incomes can be expressed as a function of the wage differential, the labour share, and the unemployment rate, hence labour market...

We explore whether finance influences the impact of labour market institutions on unemployment. Using a data set of 18 OECD countries over 1980-2004, we estimate a panel VectorAutoRegressive model. We check whether causalities from labour market variables to unemployment are affected by...

This paper examines the impact of employment protection legislation on productivity in the OECD, using annual cross-country aggregate data on the degree of regulations and industry-level data on productivity from 1982 to 2003. We adopt a "difference-in-differences" framework, which exploits...

This paper addresses the question of why high unemployment rates tend to persist even after their proximate causes have been reversed (e.g., after wages relative to productivity have fallen). We suggest that the longer people are unemployed, the greater is their cumulative likelihood of falling...