We analyze the outcomes of 332 cases from a labor court in Mexico in which a judge awarded money to a plaintiff who claimed to have been fired by a firm without cause. The judgments were enforced in only 40% of the cases. A plaintiff may try to enforce a judgment by petitioning the court to...

This paper studies the effect of mandated severance pay in a matching model featuring wage rigidity for ongoing, but not new, matches. Mandated severance pay matters only if binding real wage rigidities imply inefficient separation under employment at will. In such a case, large enough severance...

This paper is a quantitative, equilibrium study of the insurance role of severance pay when workers face displacement risk and markets are incomplete. A key feature of our model is that, in line with an established empirical literature, job displacement entails a persistent fall in earnings upon...

Recent long-run time series evidence for the US suggests that popular explanations for the surge in executive pay are not supported by the data. This paper explores the role of globalization for the rise in executive pay based on new firm survey data on executives and their pay in Austria and...