This paper summarizes the main lessons learned from Law and Employment: Lessons from Latin America and the Caribbean, a forthcoming NBER book. It places Latin American economies and economic policies in a world context. The paper quantifies the cost of regulation in Latin America and OECD Europe...

Politicians may use disguised' redistributive policies in order to circumvent opposition to explicit tax-transfer schemes. First, we present a theoretical model that formalizes this hypothesis; then we provide evidence that in US cities, politicians use public employment as such a redistributive...

Economists have examined the impact of labor market regulations on the level of employment. However, there are many reasons to suspect that the impact of regulations differs across types of workers. In this paper we take advantage of the unusual large variance in labor policy in Chile to exa...

Many low skilled jobs have been substituted away for machines in Europe, or eliminated, much more so than in the US, while technological progress at the quot;topquot;, i.e. at the high-tech sector, is faster in the US than in Europe. This paper suggests that the main difference between Europe...

In recent years, the study of labor supply has occupied the attention of a large number of economists. With the growth in interest in the topic and with the inevitable diversity of economic models and statistical methods proposed by new entrants in the field, the literature has developed its own...

This paper shows that different labor market policies can lead to differences in technology across sectors in a model of labor saving technologies. Labor market regulations reduce the skill premium and as a result, if technologies are labor saving, countries with more stringent labor regulation,...