This paper estimates and quantifies the impact of structural reforms on per capita income for a large set of OECD and non-OECD countries. The findings suggest that the quality of institutions matters to a large extent for economic outcomes. More competition-friendly regulations, as measured by...

In the 1960 cohort, American men and women graduated from college at the same rate, and this was true for Whites, Blacks and Hispanics. But in more recent cohorts, women graduate at much higher rates than men. To understand the emerging gender education gap, we formulate and estimate a model of...

Wage subsidies served as a dominant labour market policy response around the world to mitigate job losses in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, no causal evidence of their effects exists for developing countries. We use unique panel labour force survey data and exploit a temporary...

We study how job mobility, firms, and firm-ladder climbing can shape immigrants’ labor market success. Our context is the mass migration of former Soviet Union Jews to Israel during the 1990s. Once in Israel, these immigrants faced none of the legal barriers that are typically posed by...

Although public policy is influenced by the perception that workers worry about the impact of trade on their jobs, there is little empirical evidence on what shapes such views. This paper uses new data to examine how workers' perceptions of the impact of trade are related to their career paths,...

Today, Europe is a continent of low participation, low employment labor markets. Many observers would like to blame poor employment outcomes on the Euro or on austerity. But these are dangerous distractions from real problems that constitute imperatives for structural reform. There are...

Does employment flexibility facilitate cross-regional adjustments via labour mobility? Or is it instead a hinderance to cross-regional equilibration in the labour market? We examine this, drawing on a sample of 11 European countries belonging to different 'varieties' of European capitalism. We...

This paper finds that employment protection legislation (EPL) had a significant impact on employment adjustment in Europe over 2001-2013, once we account for firm-size related exemptions to EPL. We construct a novel coverage-adjusted EPL indicator and find that EPL hinders employment growth at...

This paper analyses the hiring and separation rates in Tunisia before and after the Arab Spring of 2011. Several models are specified to study employment decisions based on quarterly administrative firm level data over the period of 2007 to 2012. The data provides information about important...

In this paper we propose a novel way to model the labor market in the context of a New-Keynesian general equilibrium model, incorporating labor market frictions in the form of hiring and firing costs. We show that such a model is able to replicate many important stylized facts of the business...