Firing costs are often blamed for unemployment. This paper investigates this well spread belief. The main points are two. First, firing costs are modelled in an efficiency wage model to capture their effects on employment through wages. Secondly, dismissal conflicts are modelled explicitly. In...

During the 1980s, many European countries introduced fixed-term contracts to fight high and persistent levels of unemployment. Although these contracts have been widely used, unemployment has remained about the same after fifteen years. This paper builds a theoretical model to reconcile these...

In the mid-1980s, several European countries, characterized by high levels of employment protection, introduced fixed-term contracts. Since then most accessions to employment have been through fixed-term contracts. This Paper studies the duration pattern of fixed-term contracts and the...

This paper studies the duration pattern of fixed-term contracts and the determinants of the transformation of these into permanent ones. To address this issue we estimate a duration model for temporary employment, with competing risks of flowing into permanent employment versus non-employment,...

There is an enormous literature on gender gaps in pay and labour market participation but virtually no literature on gender gaps in unemployment rates. Although there are some countries in which there is essentially no gender gap in unemployment, there are others in which the female unemployment...