In many countries, labor courts play a central role in the determination of firing costs by monitoring and supervising the procedures for dismissals, and, eventually, deciding severance payments mandated by the employment protection legislation (EPL). To get some insights about the impact of...

Courts are an important element in the institutional framework of labor markets, often determining the actual degree of employment protection. German labor courts provide a vivid example in this regard. However, we know relatively little about actual court behavior. A unique data set on German...

This paper presents and discusses various modalities of labour market flexibility and security. The focus is on employment protection legislation, part-time work and temporary agency work, drawing evidence and examples from the Netherlands, Denmark, Spain and the United States. The main thrust...

We use the staggered adoption of Wrongful Discharge Laws (WDLs) by U.S. state courts as a quasi-natural experiment to examine the causal impact of firing costs and employment protection on corporate payouts. We find that the greater employment protection imposed by WDLs leads to higher share...

Firms respond to laws increasing employee protection by reducing both employment and capital expenditures. They use earnings management to meet earnings benchmarks less while experiencing significantly higher returns on investments, suggesting that employee protection potentially constrains...

We study how employment protection laws (EPLs) affect corporate cash-holding decision. By exploiting within-country changes in EPLs across 20 OECD countries as a source of variation in labor adjustment costs, we show that following an increase in the stringency of EPLs, firms' cash holdings...

This paper tests whether the job security offered by stricter employment protection legislation (EPL) undermines positive compensating wage differentials that would otherwise be paid. Specifically, we ask whether industries with relatively more need for layoffs and labour flexibility have lower...

Employment protection increases labor adjustment costs and hence the expected costs of financial distress for labor-intensive firms. It follows that these firms are likely to increase their cash holdings to reduce the risk of financial distress when employment protection is strengthened....

This report consists of a comprehensive overview of labour market institutions in the small Pacific island countries in order to propose recommendations to improve the performance of their labour markets. We pay particular attention to three countries: Fiji, Palau and Papua New Guinea. We focus...