Graduating from a school during a time of adverse economic conditions has a persistent, harmful effect on workers' subsequent employment opportunities. An analysis of panel data from OECD countries during the 1960-2010 periods reveals that a worker who experiences a one-percentage-point higher...

Dismissal disputes occur mostly in recessions and often lead to long and costly contract termination procedures. This paper investigates how dispute procedures may affect the job-matching process. First we present a simple accounting frame- work that corresponds with general dismissal...

Although an inverse relationship between sickness absence and unemployment has beendocumented in a number of studies using either quarterly or annual data from differentcountries with varying institutional frameworks, it is not yet clear whether this empiricalregularity is due to changes in the...

This paper studies the impact of an increase in the enforcement of labor regulations onunemployment and inequality, using city level data from Brazil. We find that stricterenforcement (affecting the payment of mandated benefits to formal workers) leads to: higherunemployment, less income...

Both raw intuition and past experience suggest that the success of an employment guaranteescheme (EGS) in safeguarding the welfare of the poor depends both on the wage itpromises, and the ease with which any worker can gain access. An EGS is thus at once awage guarantee and a rationing device....

This study examines the extent and influence of occupational licensing in the U.S. using a specially designed national labor force survey. Specifically, we provide new ways of measuring occupational licensing and consider what types of regulatory requirements and what level of government...

This chapter reviews the literature on employment and labor law. The goal of the review is to understand why every jurisdiction in the world has extensive employment law, particularly employment protection law, while most economic analysis of the law suggests that less employment protection...

Since formal laws can be observed or ignored to varying degrees, the actual enforcement regime shapes incentives and constraints. Most of the studies exploring EPL effects on labour market performance implicitly assume that EPL compliance is near to complete and therefore all firms bear full...

This paper presents and discusses new data on employment protection legislation (EPL) in the successor states of the former USSR - the CIS and Baltic states - over 25 years from 1985 to 2009. We use the OECD methodology (OECD EPL, version II) for assessing the strictness of national labor laws...

Temporary agency employment has grown steadily in most European countries over the past three decades as part of the general trend towards increased employment flexibility. Yet to this day, it remains an open question what drives the demand for temporary agency workers. The paper examines,...