The common view that far-reaching labour market deregulation is the only remedy for high European unemployment is too simplistic. First, the ecidence suggests that deeply rooted social customs are an important cause of wage rigidity, going beyonf the legal constraints emphasized in the political...

This study reports the results from a repeat survey among managers in Swedish manufacturing, designed to explore how a severe and prolonged macroeconomic shock affects wage rigidity and unemployment. Our second survey was conducted in 1998, when the unemployment rate was much higher, and the...

Fvlster and Henrekson (1998) claim that they, by addressing a number of econometric problems, can establish that it is likely that economies with a large public sector grow more slowly than economies with a small public sector. But their regressions are fundamentally flawed. Re-estimating their...

What determines the structure of labour market institutions? This paper argues that common explanations based on rent sharing are incomplete; unions, job protection, and egalitarian pay structures may have as much to do with social insurance of otherwise uninsurable risks as with rent sharing and...