International comparisons show that countries with co-ordinated wage setting generally have lower unemployment than countries with less co-ordinated wage setting. This paper argues that the monetary regime may affect whether co-ordination among many wage setters is feasible. A strict monetary...

For some time now, Swiss trade unions have been demanding a substantial increase of the wages in the lowest income segments, especially in the retail and catering service industries. At present, increases for the sales personell in the retail industry stand in the forefront of trade union...

We study a labor market where firm have private information about their ex-ante heterogeneous productivities and search is random. In this environment, a binding minimum wage can be efficiency-enhancing -- we show that setting it using a version of the Vickery-Clarke-Groves mechanism delivers...

Drawing on the original survey of Japanese firms during the COVID-19 pandemic, we estimate the impact of the crisis on firms’ sales, employment and hours worked per employee and roles of Work-from-Home (WfH) arrangements in mitigating negative effects. We find that the lowered mobility,...

We analyze the consequences for sickness absence of a selective softening of job security legislation for small firms in Sweden in 2001. According to our differences-in-difference estimates, aggregate absence in these firms fell by 0.2-0.3 days per year. This aggregate net figure hides important...

This paper presents the methodology, key results and statistical analysis of the 2015 Indicators for Regulatory Policy Governance (iREG) to complement the OECD Regulatory Policy Outlook 2015. Three composite indicators were constructed corresponding to three key principles of the 2012 OECD...

Wal-Mart matters to the form and substance of law and social reform in several distinct ways. This article describes Wal-Mart as serving three key purposes - as target, symbol, and model - in the contemporary social reform landscape. First, Wal-Mart, the largest employer in the United States is...

Argentina has had a profound regulatory activity to counteract the coronavirus pandemic so far and its consequences, which appear to worsen as time goes by. Based on the experience of other countries, a strict lockdown was put into place at an early stage, which has been opening up slowly but...

We examine the ability of the Expansionary Fiscal Contraction (EFC) hypothesis to explain the performance of of OECD economies during times of crisis. We find some limited evidence in its favour: if public consumption is reduced in response to a fiscal crisis (as defined by a high level of...

This paper surveys the link between imperfect competition and the effects of fiscal policy on output, employment and welfare. We examine static and dynamic models, with and without entry under a variety of assumptions using a common analytical framework. We find that in general there is a robust...