Using plant-level data from the Annual Survey of Industries (ASI) for the fiscal years from 1998-99 through 2007-08, this study provides plant-level cross-state/time-series evidence of the impact of employment protection legislation (EPL) on total factor productivity (TFP) and labor productivity...

There are very large literatures in public health and economics on the effects of workplace smoking bans, with most studies relying on cross-sectional variation. We provide new quasi-experimental evidence on the effects of workplace bans by using the differential timing of adoption of over 100...

We examine the timing of firms' operations in a formal model of labor demand. Merging a variety of data sets from Portugal from 1995-2004, we describe temporal patterns of firms' demand for labor and estimate production-functions and relative labor-demand equations. The results demonstrate the...

On the basis of a country*industry unbalanced panel data sample for 14 OECD countries and 18 industries covering the years 1988 to 2007, this study proposes an econometric investigation of the effects of the OECD Employment Protection Legislation (EPL) indicator on capital intensity for four...

We analyze different disability policy strategies using policy scores developed by the OECD for the period 1990 to 2007. Applying model-based and hierarchical agglomerative clustering, we investigate the existence of distinct country clusters, characterized by particular policy combinations. In...

This study is an attempt to evaluate the effects of product and labour market regulations on industry productivity through their various impacts on changes in production prices and wages. In a first stage, the estimation of a regression equation on an industry*country panel, with controls for...

Laws in most Western European countries give workers strong job rights, including the right to advance notice of layoff and the right to severance pay or other compensation if laid off. Many of these same countries also encourage hours adjustment in lieu of layoffs by providing prorated...

Job security provisions are widely believed to reduce dismissals and hiring. In addition, in developing countries job security is believed to reduce compliance with labor regulations and to increase informal activity. Reductions in dismissal costs are, thus, often advocated as a way to increase...

Many laws create important rights for today's employees, but the availability of legal representation for employees seeking to enforce those rights is uncertain. The goal of the present paper, part of the Emerging Labor Market Institutions for the 21st Century Project at the National Bureau of...

Flexible labor markets require geographically mobile workers to be efficient. Otherwise firms can take advantage of the immobility of workers and extract rents at the expense of workers. In cultures with strong family ties, moving away from home is costly. Thus, to limit the rents of firms and...