Labor courts may introduce a significant wedge between “legal” firing costs and “effective” (post-trial) firing costs. Apart from procedural costs, there is uncertainty over judges’ rulings, in particular over the likelihood of a “fair” dismissal ultimately being ruled as...

Among the working age population, one of the most damaging individual experience is found to be unemployment. Many previous studies have confirmed devastating effects of unemployment on individual well-being, both pecuniary and non-pecuniary. Using the data from the European Community Household...

After a long period of high unemployment, the EU is about to face a significant change in the demographic structure of its labour force, due to a reduction in fertility rates in the past, and increasing immigration flows. There is a long standing literature of empirical studies aiming at...

This paper examines the empirical evidence regarding the poor performance of the youth labor market in Spain over the last two decades, which entails very high unemployment for both higher and lower educated workers, symptoms of over-education, and low intensity of on-the-job training. It also...

We study changes in the wage structures in nine EU countries over 1995-2002 and the role of demand, supply and institutional developments in shaping these changes. Using comparable cross-country microeconomic data, we compute for each country and at each decile of the wage distribution, the part...

In many countries, Employment Protection Legislation (EPL) establishes different regulations for certain groups of workers who face more disadvantages in the labor market (young workers, women, unskilled workers, etc.) with the aim of improving their employability. Wellknown examples are the...