The article describes the manner in which in companies make decisions about dismissals. It begins with the presentation of a number of theories, which attempt to depict the complexity of the employment relationship. This is followed by the presentation of the legal framework and the various...

Foreign direct investment (FDI) has grown far more rapidly than trade during the last two decades. As with the other prominent features of globalisation, FDI is controversial. The impact of FDI on labour markets has been of growing concern, particularly, for source countries. The deterioration...

This study documents two empirical regularities, using data for Denmark and Portugal. First, workers who are hired last, are the first to leave the firm (Last In, First Out; LIFO). Second, workers’ wages rise with seniority (= a worker’s tenure relative to the tenure of her colleagues). We...

In a perfect labor market severance payments can have no real effects as they can be undone by a properly designed labor contract (Lazear 1990). We give empirical content to this proposition by estimating the effects of EPL on entry wages and on the tenure-wage profile in a quasi-experimental...

Consider an employer who wants her employee to work hard. As is well known from the e.ciency wage literature, the employer must pay the (wealth-constrained) employee a positive rent to provide incentives for exerting unobservable e.ort. Alternatively, the employer could make effort observable by...

In a perfect labor market severance payments can have no real effects as they can be undone by a properly designed labor contract (Lazear 1990). We give empirical content to this proposition by estimating the effects of EPL on entry wages and on the tenure-wage profile in a quasi-experimental...

We investigate the positive and normative consequences of child-labor restrictions for economic aggregates and welfare. We argue that even though the laissez-faire outcome may be inefficient, there are usually better policies to cure these inefficiencies than the imposition of a child-labor ban....

We examine the timing of firms' operations in a formal model of labor demand. Merging a variety of data sets from Portugal from 1995-2004, we describe temporal patterns of firms' demand for labor and estimate production-functions and relative labor-demand equations. The results demonstrate the...

Wage determination under asymmetric information generates inefficiencies due to excess turnover. Severance pay and layoff taxes can improve efficiency. We show that inefficient separations can even be fully removed with fixed separation taxes in the case where the relevant private information is...

This paper studies the impact of an European-like labor market regulation on the return to schooling, equilibrium unemployment and welfare. We show that firing costs and temporary employment have opposite effects on educational choices. We furthermore demonstrate that a laissez faire economy...