This paper studies the impact of an European-like labor market regulation on the return to schooling, equilibrium unemployment and welfare. We show that firing costs and temporary employment have opposite effects on educational choices. We furthermore demonstrate that a laissez faire economy...

In a general equilibrium model of a small open economy with a nontraded goods sector involuntary low-skilled labour unemployment is introduced by an exogenously given wage rate, orientating ourselves by what has been called in the literature the 'European scenario'. By the concept of constrained...

Many European labor markets are characterized by heavy employment protection taxes and the widespread use of fixed-duration contracts. The simultaneous use of these two policy instruments seems somewhat contradictory since the former primarily aims at limiting job destruction whereas the latter...

We investigate the role of spatial frictions in search equilibrium unemployment. For that, we develop a model of the labor market in which workers? location in an agglomeration depends on commuting costs, the endogenous price of land and the value of job search and employment. We first show that...

It is frequently argued that pure government-mandated severance transfers by the employer to the worker have neither employment nor welfare effect because they can be offset by private transfers from the worker to the employer. In this paper, using a dynamic search and matching model a la...

Redundany payments for collective dismissals are incorporated into a Shapiro-Stiglitz model of efficiency wages. it is shown, that a fixed payment will lower wages, leave employment and welfare unaffected if there are no wage-dependent taxes, no additionalfiring costs and if unemployment...