The consequences of introducing or tightening time limits on receiving high unemploymentbenefits are studied in a shirking model. Stricter time limits have an ambiguousimpact on the net wage, and changes of utility levels of employed workers and recipientsof high unemployment benefits have the...

The impacts of introducing work requirements for welfare recipients are studied in an efficiency wage model. If the workfare package is not mandatory, it will reduce employment, profits, and utility levels of employed and unemployed workers. In contrast, mandatory effort requirements will...

Labour market theories allowing for search frictions make marked predictions on the effect of the degree of frictions on wages. Often, the effect is predicted to be negative. Despite the popularity of these theories, this has never been tested. We perform tests with matched worker-firm data. The...

Agreements not to compete are generally an anathema to free market advocates. Independent profit maximization is one of the fundamental assumptions of the neoclassical economic model and necessary to its conclusion that markets yield results that are Paraeto efficient. Consistent with this...

The design of the employment protection legislation (EPL) is of a particular acuity in the European debate on the contours of the EPL reform. In this article we used an equilibrium unemployment model to investigate the virtue of an EPL reform whose modality is a lessening in the red tape and...

In the mid-1980s, several European countries, characterized by high levels of employment protection, introduced fixed-term contracts. Since then most accessions to employment have been through fixed-term contracts. This paper studies the duration pattern of fixed-term contracts and the...

We propose a model to study non-compete agreements and evaluate their quantitative effects. We explore an exogenous policy change that removed non-compete clauses for Brazilian footballers, the Pele Act of 1998. The Act raised players' lifetime income but changed the wage profile in a...

Dans la plupart des pays européens, la redéfinition du contrat de travail et de ses modalités de rupture est au coeur des débats contemporains de politique économique du marché du travail. Ces débats s’appuient sur l’imposante littérature consacrée aux liens entre protection de...

The design of employment protection legislation (EPL) is of particular importance in the European debate on the contours of labor market reform. In this article we appeal to an equilibrium unemployment model to investigate the virtues of EPL reform which reduces the red tape and legal costs...

Mobility restrictions (e.g., severance payment, life-long tenure, and divorce ban) are widely observed. I present a partnership model that highlights the 'break-up externality' (i.e., the negative effect of a person's break-up decision on his current partner). Under this externality, there is...