We develop measures of labor-saving and labor-augmenting technology exposure using textual analysis of patents and job tasks. Using US administrative data, we show that both measures negatively predict earnings growth of individual incumbent workers. While labor-saving technologies predict...

Using data that permit a distinction between flows of workers, directly measured, and job creation and destruction, again, directly measured, we develop employment and job flow statistics for a representative sample of French establishments for 1987 to 1990. Annual job creation can be...

The theoretical predictions of how employment protection affects firm productivity are ambiguous. In this paper I study the effect of employment protection rules on labor productivity using micro data on Swedish firms. A reform of the employment protection rules in 2001 made it possible for...

Somewhat surprisingly, cross-country empirical evidence (at least in the cross section) does not seem to support the predictions of standard models that economies with stricter regulations on hiring and firing should have a lower pace of job reallocation. One problem in exploring these issues...

This paper examines the extent to which firms in selected MENA countries reported being constrained by the business environment around the time of the Arab Spring and the extent to which these constraints affected their employment performance. The results suggest that small firms in MENA faced...

There is increasing pressure for the flexibility of labour markets both in current EU member states and candidate countries. The paper aims to estimate the strictness of employment protection regulation, one of the most relevant aspects of labour market flexibility, and the degree of its actual...

Fifty-six years after the introduction of affirmative action in employment in the U.S., there is a lack of consensus regarding the effect of this policy on workers’ careers (Holzerand Neumark, 2000). This paper contributes to fill this gap by building and analyzing a dataset that allows us to...

This paper studies the impact of an increase in the enforcement of labor regulations on unemployment and inequality, using city level data from Brazil. We find that stricter enforcement (affecting the payment of mandated benefits to formal workers) leads to: higher unemployment, less income...

Over the past decade, the share of jobs not controlled by the state has increased considerably, whilst employment in agriculture has declined, against the backdrop of ongoing urbanisation. Over 200 million people have been drawn into urban areas through official or unofficial migration, despite...

What drove the UK productivity slowdown post-GFC, and how is the post-Covid recovery expected to differ? This paper traces the sources of TFP growth in the UK over the last two decades through the lens of a structural model of innovation, using registry data on the universe of firms. The...