This survey highlights the key results of the empirical literature concerning the costs of flexibility enhancing reforms in product and labour markets. The documented costs include reduced employment, loss of government revenue, undesirable distributional consequences and political instability....

Australia has a dynamic labour market with high job turnover. According to the HILDA Survey data, about one-fifth of all employees separate from their job every year, and about one fifth of those are displaced workers - laid off for economic reasons. Using multivariate probit regression we find...

This paper reviews empirical research on finance and labour markets. Preliminary themes in the literature follow. Finance may interact with labour market institutions to jointly determine labour outcomes. Highly leveraged firms show greater employment volatility during cyclical fluctuations, and...

Norway has a well-functioning labour market with high employment and a compressed wage distribution, contributing to low inequality. Norway nevertheless faces challenges from a trend decline in employment rates among the young and prime-age men. Furthermore, immigrants and people with...

This paper provides an overview of labour market resilience in the wake of the Great Recession of 2008-09 and the role played by macroeconomic and structural policies. The OECD unemployment rate has returned to close to its pre-crisis level, but the unemployment cost of the Great Recession has...

Occupational licensing and non-competition agreements are two important types of labour market regulation in the United States, both covering around one fifth of all workers. While some regulation is needed to protect safety and ensure quality of services, it also creates entry barriers and...

Digitalisation is one of the megatrends affecting societies and labour markets, alongside demographic change and globalisation. The fourth industrial revolution will redesign production processes and alter the relationships between work and leisure, capital and labour, the rich and the poor, the...

A well-functioning labour market is indispensable to promote job creation, increase living standards, and develop a cohesive society. In Italy, the various deficiencies of the labour market have resulted in high unemployment, low labour force participation and job-skill mismatch. These...

Impressive productivity performance during the last decades has weakened since 2007, reflecting the 2008-09 recession but also a poor performance in important sectors, like the information and communication technology sector. Reforms to raise long term productivity growth need to be pursued....

Although job creation has improved, since the end of the 2007-08 recession, the effects of the recession on the labour market remain severe. Unemployment duration is still extremely high, and many have withdrawn from the labour market altogether. Because the weakness is largely cyclical in...