This paper links the theory of interest groups influence over the legislature with that of congressional control over the judiciary. The resulting framework reconciles the theoretical literature of lobbying with the negative available evidence on the impact of lobbying over legislative outcomes,...

Some anti-discrimination laws have the perverse effect of harming the very class they were meant to protect. This paper provides evidence that age discrimination laws belong to this perverse class. Prior to the enforcement of the federal law, state laws had little effect on older workers,...

We provide a simple explanation for the observation that the variance of job destruction is greater than the variance of job creation: job creation is costlier at the margin than job destruction. As Caballero [2] has argued, asymmetric employment adjustment costs at the establishment level need...

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...

Our paper presents a methodology that can be used to estimate the extent of noncompliance with the overtime pay provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). The methodology is applied to data from the May 1978 Current Population Survey and the 1977 Michigan Quality of Employment Survey....

We investigate the regulation of labor markets through employment laws, collective bargaining laws, and social security laws in 85 countries. We find that richer countries regulate labor less than poorer countries do, although they have more generous social security systems. The political power...

The goal of this paper is to examine the implied penalty policies underlying the remedies created by the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) in terms of the policies' impact on employer and union behaviors. We present a simple model of deterrence as a means of evaluating workplace penalty...

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...

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...

British Master and Servant law made employee contract breach a criminal offense until 1875. We develop a contracting model generating equilibrium contract breach and prosecutions, then exploit exogenous changes in output prices to examine the effects of labor demand shocks on prosecutions....