The Great Recession did not only affect European countries to a varying extent, its impact on national labour markets and on specific socio-economic groups in those markets also varied greatly. Institutional arrangements such as employment protection, unemployment insurance benefits and minimum...

There has been a strong interest in short-time work (STW) schemes during the global financial crisis. Using data for 23 OECD countries for the period 2004 Q1 to 2010 Q4, this paper analyses the quantitative effects of STW programmes on labour market outcomes. Special attention is given to the...

Unemployment insurance is a key tool for risk sharing and redistribution and also a prominent automatic stabiliser. It is a volatile spending item by design, which can lead to vulnerabilities. This paper explores various shocks and sources of vulnerability of the unemployment insurance schemes...

We examine the economic and social determinants of suicide mortality in a panel of 25 OECD countries over the period 1970 - 2011 and explicitly analyze the effects of unemployment and labor market institutions on suicide rates. In line with a large body of literature our results suggest that...

In Europe, as in the rest of industrialized countries, reforms of the labour market have generally concerned employment protection legislation (EPL). One of the main missions of this legislation is to insure security for workers, particularly in case of redundancy. The object of this article is...

Empirical investigation of the labor market consequences of employment protection has mushroomed since Lazear's (1990) pioneering study. Having sketched the theoretical background, we chart the course of the modern empirical literature. We focus mainly on dismissals protection, distinguishing...

In theoretical literature, the effects of employment protection on unemployment are ambiguous. Higher employment protection decreases job creation as well as job destruction. However, in most models, wages are bargained individually between workers and firms. Using a conventional matching model...

Unemployment insurance schemes face a well-known trade-off between providing income support to those out of work and reducing their incentive to look for work. This trade-off between benefits and incentives is central to the public debate about extending benefit periods during the recent...

Wage insurance is a program that attempts to help permanently displaced workers transition to employment rapidly, effectively, and equitably. Because displaced workers have been found to suffer substantial earnings losses when they become reemployed, a wage insurance program provides a temporary...