We study the employment and distributional effects of regulating (reducing) working time in a general equilibrium model with search-matching frictions. Job creation entails fixed costs, but existing jobs are subject to diminishing returns. We characterize the equilibrium in the de-regulated...

We study the evolution of sectoral employment and labor cost in eleven European countries in the last two decades. Our statistical approach consists in decomposing for country, industry and temporal effects. Virtual economies are constructed by filtering country effects. We find that sectoral...