This paper focuses on the nexus between international labour standards and international trade governance, as labour rights provisions (applicable to both local and migrant workers) are increasingly being included in free trade agreements. Nevertheless, for the past few decades, the preservation...

We use leximetric data coding techniques and panel data econometrics to test for the economic effects of laws governing worker representation and industrial action in the large middle-income countries of Brazil, China, India, Russia and South Africa. We find that more worker-protective laws on...

This paper critiques The Regulation of Labor, an empirical study recently published by Juan C. Botero, Simeon Djankov, Rafael La Porta, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes, and Andrei Shleifer in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. The Regulation of Labor extends these authors' comparative research to...

The past decade has seen a transformation of the international labour rights regime based primarily on the adoption of the 1998 ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work, and the widespread use of the concept of 'core labour standards'. Notwithstanding the enthusiasm which has...

We investigate the regulation of labor markets through employment laws, collective bargaining laws, and social security laws in 85 countries. We find that richer countries regulate labor less than poorer countries do, although they have more generous social security systems. The political power...

On 7 August 2007, Gordon Anderson delivered his inaugural lecture after becoming a professor in the Law Faculty of Victoria University of Wellington. Gordon took as his theme the protection of employees employed on an individual contract of employment. Following the repeal of the award system by...

Although it is widely understood that employers and employees are not equally situated, we fail adequately to account for this inequality in the law governing their relationship. We can best understand this inequality in terms of status, which encompasses one's level of income, leisure and...

The existing literature investigating the labor market impact of immigration assumes, implicitly or explicitly, that the law or labor regulation is exogenous to immigration. To test this assumption, we build a novel workers' protection measure based on 36 labor law variables that capture labor...

This paper examines the economic effects of employment protection legislation in a sample of developed and developing countries. By implementing a difference-in-differences test, we lessen the potentially severe endogeneity and omitted variable problems associated with cross-country regressions....