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...

Is privatization in a country related to the stringency of its employment protection laws (EPL) – and, if so, how? We address this question using privatization deals in fourteen European countries over three decades and all the changes in EPL within a country. Using traditional...

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...

Do employment protection laws hinder privatization? Using privatization deals in fourteen European countries from 1977-2003 and within-country variation in employment protection laws, we find that stringent employment protection laws significantly deter privatization. The fear of job cuts...

This paper examines the impact of English and Australian unfair dismissal legislation on the common law rules which govern the termination of the employment contract. To explore this issue, the paper first outlines some general approaches to the interaction between statute law and the common...

In this paper we analyse the employment implications of firing restrictions. We find that when a recession is expected and the trend rate of productivity growth is small, a rise in firing costs affects mainly the hiring decision. Thus there is a negative effect on average employment. When, on...

Using population-level administrative data, we study labor market externalities stemming from age-specific employment protection legislation (EPL) targeted towards older workers. Our results show no economically meaningful overall effects of the EPL on employment or earnings of either men or...

Many European labor markets are characterized by heavy employment protection taxes and the widespread use of fixed-duration contracts. The simultaneous use of these two policy instruments seems somewhat contradictory since the former primarily aims at limiting job destruction whereas the latter...

This paper studies firms' job creation decisions in a labor market with search frictions. A simple labor market search model is developed in which a firm can search for a second employee while producing with a first worker, and this creates the equilibrium size distribution of firms. A firm...

We study how firm-specific complementary assets and intellectual property rights affect the management of knowledge workers. The main results show when a firm will wish to sue workers that leave with innovative ideas, and the effects of complementary assets on wages and on worker initiative. We...