A rapidly expanding empirical literature has addressed the widely accepted claim that employment-unfriendly labor market institutions explain the pattern of unemployment across countries. The main culprits are held to be protective institutions, namely unemployment benefit entitlements,...

This paper documents the employment disadvantage faced by the less qualified part of the labor force and examines the factors that influence the differing extent of this disadvantage across OECD countries. We argue that employment rates for quartiles of the population ranked by educational...