This chapter reviews the literature on employment and labor law. The goal of the review is to understand why every jurisdiction in the world has extensive employment law, particularly employment protection law, while most economic analysis of the law suggests that less employment protection...

Severance pay, a fixed-sum payment to workers at job separation, has been the focus of intense policy concern for the last several decades, but much of this concern is unearned. The design of the ideal separation package is outlined and severance pay emerges as a natural component of job...

This chapter reviews the literature on employment and labor law. The goal of the review is to understand why every jurisdiction in the world has extensive employment law, particularly employment protection law, while most economic analysis of the law suggests that less employment protection...

This paper examines the competitive search equilibrium when the workers' effort choice and type are private information. We derive a modified Hosios rule determining the allocation of resources and analyze how private information influences the responsiveness of the unemployment rate to changes...

We introduce dynamic incentive contracts into a model of unemployment dynamics and present three results. First, wage cyclicality from incentives does not dampen unemployment dynamics: the response of unemployment to shocks is first-order equivalent in an economy with flexible incentive pay and...

This paper reconsiders the result of Stole and Zwiebel (1996) that when a firm bargains with its workers over the wages in non-binding contracts, the firm will over-employ workers to reduce the hold-up power of any one. This result has stood in contrast to conclusions drawn in the literature on...

We study a gift exchange game with 12 employees and one employer. When the employer can offer individually differentiated wages in a setting without collective action, we observe high levels of wages, effort choices, and total earnings. When the employer is restricted to offering a uniform wage,...

Using a dynamic general equilibrium model, the paper provides a quantitative assessment of the impact of the Multifiber Agreement dismantling on unemployment in Tunisia. The specification of intertemporal behavior of households and firms permits the analysis of the effects of the shock on...

This paper demonstrates that insiders can erect barriers to entry and skim rents by sinking costs in human capital when labour markets are otherwise perfectly contestable. The sunk costs nature of human capital investments may result from the need to satisfy ever increasing specialised skill...

Whereas the standard modern theories of unemployment were developed in the context of a single sector labour market, this paper presents a survey of how these theories can be integrated into a dual labour market setting. This approach dichotomises the labour market into two sectors, a primary...