In August 2010 the Costa Rican government implemented a comprehensive program to increase compliance with legal minimum wages, the Campaign for Minimum Wages. To evaluate the impact of the Campaign, we use a regression discontinuity approach, which compares what happened to workers who before...

This paper studies gross worker flows to explain the rising informality in Brazilian metropolitan labor markets from 1983-2002. This period covers two economic cycles, several stabilization plans, a far-reaching trade liberalization, and changes in labor legislation through the Constitutional...

This article is an idiosyncratic survey of the insider-outsider theory, describing the vision underlying the theory, and evaluating salient contributions to the literature in the light of this vision. We also indicate what appear to have been dead-ends and red herrings in past research. The...

Social insurance programs typically comprise sick leave insurance. An important policy parameter is how the cost of sick leave are shared between workers, firms, and the social security system. We show that this sharing rule affects not only absence behavior, but also workers' subsequent health....

This paper examines reforms in German employment protection for permanent workers (EPLP) on workers' well-being proxied by life satisfaction. Using variation in how the reforms affected firms of different sizes, I apply a difference-in-differences approach in conjunction with individual fixed...

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...

The number of long-term unemployed in Germany has stagnated at around one million for several years. Despite excellent labour market conditions, the long-term unemployment rate is well above the OECD average. Therefore, the "carrot and stick" principle of Hartz reforms is in clear need of...

In the past 15 years around 160 million Chinese rural workers migrated to cities to work. Because of restrictions on migrant access to local health and education system a large cohort of migrant children are left-behind in rural villages and growing up without parental care. This paper examines...

Although the sectors and fraction of workers covered are small given the low rates of formality and urbanization in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), as the number of covered workers grows wage regulation will become increasingly significant. We find that higher minimum wage values are associated with...

Often, minimum wage laws are decided at the state or regional level, and even when not, federal level increases are only binding in certain states. This has been used in previous literature to evaluate the effects of minimum wages on earnings and employment levels. This paper introduces a...