Theory predicts that the wage effects of government-mandated severance payments depend on workers' and firms' relative bargaining power. This paper estimates the effect of employment protection legislation (EPL) on workers' individual wages in a quasi-experimental setting, exploiting a reform...

Economists face difficulties explaining the strong cyclicality of US unemployment. This paper contributes both by developing modeling tools and evaluating a potentially important explanation. The paper develops a parsimonious equilibrium model of job search with aggregate productivity shocks,...

In a perfect labor market severance payments can have no real effects as they can be undone by a properly designed labor contract (Lazear 1990). We give empirical content to this proposition by estimating the effects of EPL on entry wages and on the tenure-wage profile in a quasi-experimental...

In a perfect labor market severance payments can have no real effects as they can be undone by a properly designed labor contract (Lazear 1990). We give empirical content to this proposition by estimating the effects of EPL on entry wages and on the tenure-wage profile in a quasi-experimental...

This paper proposes an explanation for observed differences in the business cycle volatility of employment and unemployment across a sample of OECD countries. Using an incomplete markets variant of the fair wage real business cycle model, increases in the gross replacement rate of public...