An account of layoffs in America, their questionable necessity, their overuse, and their devastating impact on individuals at all income levels. Economics journalist Uchitelle explains how, in the mid-1970s, the first major layoffs, a limited response to the inroads of foreign competition,...

This paper investigates the role that idiosyncratic uncertainty plays in shaping social preferences over the degree of labor market flexibility, in a general equilibrium model of dynamic labor demand where the productivity of firms evolves over time as a Geometric Brownian motion. A key result...

This paper examines the economic effects of employment protection legislation in a sample of developed and developing countries. Implementing a difference-indifferences test lessens the potentially severe endogeneity and omitted variable problems associated with cross-country regressions. This...