This paper presents a selective survey of the recent literature on labour market institutions. It describes the different empirical approaches used to explore the nexus between labour market institutions and labour market performance. It stresses that the effect of institutions is complex in...

Measures aimed at reducing the tax burden on labour have been advocated to alleviate the EU unemployment problem. Most of the analyses document a relationship between the unemployment rate and the tax burden on labour. Hence, it is not possible to discern whether the effect on unemployment...

The paper examines the rationale for creating a database on labour market reforms and looks at the value-added of LABREF compared with existing datasets. In doing so, it considers recent developments in the economic literature as regards the design of labour market institutions. After a...

After presenting an extensive overview of the reforms undertaken in the EU between 1990 and 2006, The paper assess with a diff-in-diff technique the short-term effects of pension reforms on the participation rates of individuals aged between 50 and 64 years. The analysis suggests that in the...

Both common macroeconomic shocks and country-specific developments have subjected the flexibility of wage setting mechanisms in the euro area to a stress test in recent years. Against this background, this paper takes a fresh look at wage flexibility in EMU and attempts to draw a few lessons...

Using a variety of economic models, the Commission services have examined the impact of several reforms forming part of the Growth and Jobs Strategy (GJS). Overall, the results show that past reforms have delivered significant benefits, and that further reforms in key areas could generate...

This paper analyses both the long and the short-run relation between government expenditure and potential output in EU countries by means of pooled mean group estimation (Pesaran, Shin, and Smith (1999)).  Results show that, over a sample comprising EU-15 countries over the 1970-2003 period,...