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...

Under the Obama administration, the influence and involvement of trade unions in government policy decisions has surged to unprecedented levels. Some of the more egregious examples include the proposed Employee Free Choice Act, which abolishes the secret ballot among workers deciding on union...

This essay provides an overview of the central theoretical law and economics insights and empirical findings concerning antidiscrimination law across a variety of contexts including discrimination in labor markets, housing markets, consumer purchases, and policing. The different models of...

The Employment Protection Legislation (EPL) has been at the heart of many analyses with regard to its macroeconomic impact on the labor market outcomes. However, some more recent literature studies the effects of the EPL, specially concerning the individual dismissal, on the behavior of economic...

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...

Title I of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is an employment protection policy for disabled workers. By exploiting cross-state variation in pre-ADA legislation, we measure the effects of the law on transition rates of disabled workers. We find a decline in employment-to-non-employment...

This paper exploits inter-temporal variations in employment protection across countries and finds that rigidities in labor markets are an important determinant of firms' capital structure decisions. Over the 1985-2007 period, we find that reforms increasing employment protection are associated...

The paper analyses the method adopted by the index of employment protection systems developed in 1999 by the OECD and discusses its reliability and shortcomings, in particular with regards to Italy. The paper highlights a series of problems of method arising from the aggregation of the...

Under symmetric information, a job protection law which says that a principal who has hired an agent today must also employ him tomorrow can only reduce the two parties' total surplus. The law restricts the principal's possibilities to maximize her profit, which equals the total surplus, because...