Many European labor markets are characterized by heavy employment protection taxes and the widespread use of fixed-duration contracts. The simultaneous use of these two policy instruments seems somewhat contradictory since the former primarily aims at limiting job destruction whereas the latter...

Empirical investigation of the labor market consequences of employment protection has mushroomed since Lazear's (1990) pioneering study. Having sketched the theoretical background, we chart the course of the modern empirical literature. We focus mainly on dismissals protection, distinguishing...

Das Ziel der vorliegenden Untersuchung besteht darin, die wesentlichen Determinanten für das Auftreten von Fehlzeiten zu analysieren. In einem ersten Schritt werden die institutionellen Rahmenbedingungen der Entgeltfortzahlung und ihre historische Entwicklung aufgezeigt. Die Analyse...

In order to simplify the representation of a technological relationship between inputs and outputs, a production unit's technology must typically satisfy some restrictive conditions, some of them being well known in the literature. This paper presents new results for aggregating labour inputs...

The existing literature ignores the fact that in most European countries the strictness of Employment Protection Legislation (EPL) varies across the firm size distribution. In Italy firms are obliged to rehire an unfairly dismissed worker only if they employ more than 15 employees....

Das Ziel der vorliegenden Untersuchung besteht darin, die wesentlichen Determinanten für das Auftreten von Fehlzeiten zu analysieren. In einem ersten Schritt werden die institutionellen Rahmenbedingungen der Entgeltfortzahlung und ihre historische Entwicklung aufgezeigt. Die Analyse...

The paper examines the relative effectiveness of two policy proposals in reducing unemployment and working poverty: unemployment vouchers and low-wage subsidies. The unemployment vouchers are targeted exclusively at the unemployed (especially the longterm unemployed) and are provided only for a...

In this study we examine the contribution of severance pay to employment and unemployment development using data on industrialized OECD countries. Our starting point is Lazear?s (1990) empirical dictum that severance payment requirements adversely impact the labor market. We extend his sample...

We analyze how wage setting institutions and job-security provisions interact on unemployment. The assumption that wages are renegotiated by mutual agreement only is introduced in a matching model with endogenous job destruction – la Mortensen and Pissarides (1994) in order to get wage...

A matching model in the line of Mortensen and Pissarides (1994) is augmented with a lowskill labor market and firing costs. It is shown that even with flexible wages unemployment is higher among the low-skilled and increases with skill-biased technological change. The two main reasons are that...