The unemployment rate is conventionally relied upon to measure national employment performance, and has been the main indicator justifying comprehensive labor market reforms, generally in the direction of deregulation and benefit reduction. The starting point of this working paper is that a...

Measured by changes in real wages, earnings inequality and unemployment, the economic position of lower skilled workers has declined sharply over the past two decades across the developed countries of the OECD. In this paper we survey a wide-ranging empirical literature for evidence bearing on...

This paper provides a critical view of the cross country literature on the impact of labour market institutions and policies on the evolving pattern of unemployment in OECD countries. Such widely used indicators as the generosity of unemployment insurance or the strength of trade unions are...

Based on a survey of the literature, assesses the strength of the evidence regarding the effects of labour market institutions and regulations on unemployment. Considers the effects of employment protection, trade union density, bargaining coordination, unemployment benefits, the labour tax...

In New Classical and New Keynesian thinking, the cross-country pattern of unemployment reflects prevailing equilibrium rates, which in turn are mainly explained by the protective labor market institutions that produce market rigidities. While this orthodox view has framed nearly all of the...

Grounded in the standard supply and demand model, the conventional wisdom assumes a tradeoff between earnings inequality and unemployment, blames low skills for high earnings inequality in the U.S. and U.K., and attributes high European unemployment to institutional constraints. This paper finds...