Interventions designed to support small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are popular among policy makers, given the role SMEs play in job creation around the world. Business support interventions in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) are often based on the assumption that market failures and...

Unemployment rates, especially among youth, have increased in various countries of Europe over the last years. As labor force participation rate is one key influence on unemployment, I estimate country specific coefficients for the responsiveness of the labor force participation rates to the...

Labour market tightness, that is the ratio of jobs to the unemployed, has an impact on wage setting, which also affects inflation. Among other things, the unemployment gap, which is the difference between unemployment rate and non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU), is used to...

Brazil is one of thirteen countries in the world whose social insurance system offers a pension based solely upon length of contribution, with no age requirement. This kind of benefit allows contributors to have access to pensions at relatively young ages (here defined as before 60 years old for...

We use national labor force surveys from 1983 through 2011 to construct hours worked per person on the aggregate level and for different demographic groups for 18 European countries and the US. We find that Europeans work 19% fewer hours than US citizens. Differences in weeks worked and in the...

Emigration has accelerated since 2007 in Hungary. The short history of the new phenomenon called intense political and social reactions. The paper focuses on a particular segment of emigration: on labour emigration of those employed persons who are still connected to the home country and...

Non-renewable fixed-term and agency work contracts are becoming more used instead of the traditional Russian model of open-ended employment. The authors examine the influence of institutional and organizational factors on the use of two forms of non-standard work contracts in Russia with data...

We present quasi-experimental evidence on the effects of increasing the Early Retirement Age (ERA) on older workers' retirement decisions. The analysis is based on social security reforms in Austria in 2000 and 2004, and administrative data allows us to distinguish between pension claims and job...

This article explores the long-run relationship between unemployment rate and labor force participation rate in Canada. The cointegration analysis vindicates the existence of a long-run relationship between these two variables. This finding leads us to doubt the pertinence of the unemployment...

We use national labor force surveys from 1983 through 2011 to construct hours worked per person on the aggregate level and for different demographic groups for 18 European countries and the US. We find that Europeans work 19% fewer hours than US citizens. Differences in weeks worked and in the...