The goal of this paper is to detect the degree to which court decisions control the stringency of employment protection and to investigate how such judicial discretion affects labor market performance. However, identification difficulty arises because court decisions are volatile against...

In 2004, a section was added to the German Protection against Dismissal Act, establishing a new procedure to dismiss an employee, given a predetermined severance payment. Most legal scholars presume the change to be without impact, while a minority of experts claims it to be either beneficial or...

This paper is based on the first use of program administrative data from Brazil's unemployment insurance (UI) program to assess the impact of changes in UI eligibility criteria on layoff probabilities. We exploit exogenous program changes introduced by executive and legislative changes in 2015...

We collect rich establishment-level data about advance layoff notices filed under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act since January 1990. We present in-sample evidence that the number of workers affected by WARN notices leads state-level initial unemployment insurance...

Exploiting an unemployment insurance (UI) reform in Brazil, we study incentive effects of UI in the presence of informal labor markets. We find that eligibility for UI benefits increases formal layoffs by twelve percent. Most of the additional formal layoffs are related to workers transitioning...

This paper is based on the first use of program administrative data from Brazil's unemployment insurance (UI) program to assess the impact of changes in UI eligibility criteria on layoff probabilities. We exploit exogenous program changes introduced by executive and legislative changes in 2015...

Severance pay is a vital part of employment protection legislation (EPL). We investigate the incidence and level of severance pay for dismissed employees. Our theoretical model predicts that not only the law and its interpretation by labour courts but also the costs of a suit have an impact....

Despite its significant influence on the actual enforcement of the law, the economic cost of court discretion has been ignored in the literature on employment protection. This paper exploits a distinctive feature of the Japanese judicial system, periodic judge transfers, to identify court...

We investigate the effect of employment protection legislation (EPL) on the propensity to hire workers from unemployment and active labor market programs (ALMPs), utilizing a reform that decreased dismissal costs for small firms only. Using administrative data from Sweden, we find that less...

We investigate the effect of employment protection legislation (EPL) on the propensity to hire workers from unemployment and active labor market programs (ALMPs), utilizing a reform that decreased dismissal costs for small firms only. Using administrative data from Sweden, we find that less...