Starting in 1985, (West) German unions began to reduce standard hours on an industry by industry basis, in an attempt to lower unemployment. Whether work-sharing works - whether employment rises when hours per worker are reduced - is theoretically ambiguous. I test this using both individual...

Germany experienced an even deeper fall in GDP in the Great Recession than the United States, with little employment loss. Employers' reticence to hire in the preceding expansion, associated in part with a lack of confidence it would last, contributed to an employment shortfall equivalent to 40...

This paper deals with the reform to labor market regulation implemented by Chile during the last twenty years. We concentrate on the reform to job security, on the decentralization of the wage bargaining process, and on the reduction in payroll taxes. Our interest is to understand to what extent...

We estimate the effect of immigrant flows on native employment in Western Europe, and then ask whether the employment consequences of immigration vary with institutions that affect labor market flexibility. Reduced flexibility may protect natives from immigrant competition in the near term, but...

This paper investigates whether a larger public sector limits labor market adjustment, using data from the United States and the United Kingdom, two countries with quite different public/private employment trends. The results indicate that the two countries have a similar mix of occupations and...

This study examines the changes in labor market institutions and outcomes across (ECD countries in the past two decades and relates indicators of the institutions to outcomes. It has four findings. First, there has been an increased divergence in labor market institutions, with unionisation...

The Great Recession tested the ability of the "great U.S. jobs machine" to limit the severity of unemployment in a major economic downturn and to restore full employment quickly afterward. In the crisis the American labor market failed to live up to expectations. The level and duration of...

This paper develops a model to study the aggregate effects of labor market frictions in a small open economy where firms grow slowly and make fixed export investments. The model features interactions between dynamic investments in exporting and search frictions with job-to- job mobility. A...

We investigate the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on labor activity using real-time data from millions of GitHub users around the world. We show that the pandemic triggered a sharp pattern of labor reallocation at both the global and regional level. Users were more likely to work on weekends...