Regional political economy and labor reform -- The roots of unemployment and the political economy of lay-offs -- Remaking China's urban welfare and labor market policies -- Pathways to re-employment -- Contention, protest, and social order -- Conclusion

In a seminal paper Gibbons and Katz (1991; GK) develop and empirically test an asymmetric information model of the labor market. The model predicts that wage losses following displacement should be larger for layouts than for plant closings, which was borne out by data from the Displaced Workers...

This paper examines the economic effects of employment protection legislation in a sample of developed and developing countries. Implementing a difference-indifferences test lessens the potentially severe endogeneity and omitted variable problems associated with cross-country regressions. This...