This paper presents a case study on reforming a very dysfunctional labor market with a deep insider-outsider divide, namely the Spanish case. We show how a dual market, with permanent and temporary employees makes real reform much harder, and leads to purely marginal changes that do not alter...

Our goal here is to explain the strikingly different response of Spanish unemployment relative to other European economies, in particular France, during the ongoing recession. The Spanish unemployment rate, which fell from 22% in 1994 to 8% in 2007, reached 19% by the end of 2009, whereas the...

Collective bargaining regulation in Spain was put in place at the beginning of the 1980s and, despite successive labour market reforms, its main ingredients are still intact. In this paper we argue that the Spanish regulation of collective bargaining fits neither the current Spanish economic...

Over the last quarter century, the Spanish unemployment rate has gone from 3.5% to 24% of the labor force, and then back to 13%. In this paper we describe this extraordinary evolution more in detail, discuss the main shocks and institutions behind it, and provide a set of policy implications...

This paper examines the empirical evidence regarding the poor performance of the youth labor market in Spain over the last two decades, which entails very high unemployment for both higher and lower educated workers, symptoms of over-education, and low intensity of on-the-job training. It also...

During the last two decades many EU countries have reformed the set of legal rules that regulate dismissals. And, in contrast with other institutional reforms of the labour market, there seems to be a common strategy of maintaining strict employment protection legislation for workers under the...

This paper considers a matching model of heterogenous workers and jobs which includes on-the-job search. High-educated workers transitorily accept unskilled jobs and continue to search for skilled jobs. We study the implications of this model for the unemployment rates of high and low-educated...

This paper considers a matching model with heterogenous jobs (unskilled and skilled) and workers ( low and high- educated) which allows for on-the-job search by mismatched workers. The latter are high-educated workers who transitorily accept unskilled jobs and continue to search for skilled...