Until now there exists no consensus view on the determinants of unemployment. Whereas some empirical papers find that mainly labour market institutions explain unemployment, others argue that this correlation is not robust. One explanation for these contradictory results is that labour market...

This paper addresses the design of the machinery of collective bargaining from the perspective of the needs of microeconomic and macroeconomic flexibility. In the former context, greater attention is given over to enterprise flexibility than external adjustment. In the latter context, close...

International comparisons of labour market institutions and their transfer across boundaries have gained in importance. The paper deals with the question of the best way to proceed in making such comparisons. At the same time the question of the possibilities and limits to institutional transfer...

In this paper I evaluate the effects of a regional experiment that reduced payroll-taxes by 3-6 percentage points of the firm's wage sum in Northern and Eastern Finland. I estimate the effect of the payroll-tax reduction on firms' employment, wage sum and profits, and on workers hourly pay and...

Using data on 17 OECD countries for 1960-98, this paper studies the impact of unions on public employment incidence, using macrodata and microdata. Macrodata show that greater coverage by centralized collective bargaining institutions raises the public employment share, controlling for country...

This paper present paper provides the first results for Germany on the impact of works councils and collective agreements on plant closings, using data from the IAB establishment panel. We find evidence of a robust positive association between works council presence and plant closures. The...

This paper presents the first analysis of the effect of teacher collective bargaining on long-run labor market and educational attainment outcomes. Our analysis exploits the different timing across states in the passage of duty-to-bargain laws in a difference-in-difference framework to identify...

The authors investigate the employment consequences of minimum wage regulation in 16 OECD countries, 1970-2008. Their treatment is motivated by Neumark and Wascher's (2004) seminal cross-country study. Apart from the longer time interval examined, a major departure is the authors' focus on...

This paper discusses the question of the concentrated pattern of agricultural development in Brazil, as expressed in the predominance of large-scale production, high level of mechanization and low absorption of non-qualified labor. It is proposed, initially, the existence of two conflicting...

In this short communication, it is recalled that unions traditionally follow a policy of pushing higher average wages and at the same time propose a compression of the structure of wages and salaries, which follows the theory of some sort of equity. Considering a steep downfall of union density...