This paper provides a comparison of the incidence and composition of female employment both in the EU and in the US. Despite a significant increase in female labour market participation in the EU, about 50% of the difference between the employment rates in the US and the EU can still be...

In order to offer a balanced assessment of the role of minimum wages in the Welfare State, seven basic questions need to be answered: (i) Why is the minimum wage a useful redistributive tool?; (ii) How binding are minimum wage floors in different countries?; (iii) To what extent do minimum wages...

We use a panel of OECD countries to gauge the relevance of the relative size of the youth population, labour market institutions and macroeconomic shocks at explaining observed relative youth unemployment rates. We find that the fluctuations of the youth population size caused by the baby boom...

One of the reasons for persistent high unemployment in Spain has been attributed to a low mobility of workers between regions. We examine workers’ geographical mobility indirectly through migration willingness of unemployed. We focus on two observed patterns in migration willingness, downward...

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 surveys the main issues in the debate about pensions. The first part of the paper contains some calculations of the future evolution of the pension burden in Spain. The second part of the paper comments on the effects of policy measures that could either control expenditures on...

Employment protection legislations (EPL) are not enforced uniformly across the board. There are a number of exemptions to the coverage of these provisions: firms below a given threshold scale and workers with temporary contracts are not subject to the most restrictive provisions. This within...

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...