The public employment service (PES) makes use in many countries of vacancy referrals as to facilitate the matching between unemployed workers and vacancies. Based on a 'timing-of-events' approach to control for selective participation, this study evaluates whether this policy instrument enhanced...

Employment Security Agreements, which are elements of Swedish collective agreements, offer a unique opportunity to study very early job search counselling of displaced workers. These agreements provide individual job search assistance to workers who are dismissed due to redundancy, often as...

We analyse theoretically and empirically the effects on young people's labour market outcomes of two specific labour market institutions and their interaction: employment protection legislation andactive labour market policy. The paper examines recent policy reforms in Italy focusing on the...

Many workers believe that personal contacts are crucial for obtaining jobs in high-wage sectors. On the other hand, firms in high-wage sectors report using employee referrals because they help provide screening and monitoring of new employees. This paper develops a matching model that can...

General equilibrium analyses of layoff costs have had mixed messages on the implications for employment. This paper brings out the economic forces at work and explains the disparate results. Specifically, we show that positive employment effects of layoff costs come through reducing labor...

Reforms of employment protection (EPL) in Europe eased the recourse to temporary forms of employment while not reducing the strictness of EPL of permanent jobs (with the exception of Spain). Since 1990, such two-tier reforms have been implemented in Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Italy, the...

Since the middle of the 1980s many European countries have reduced the strictness of their employment protection mainly by relaxing it for temporary jobs. These countries are Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and Sweden. The article explores the...

Eingliederungszuschüsse sind ein zentrales Instrument der aktiven Arbeitsmarktpolitik in Deutschland. Diese Studie untersucht für Westdeutschland, ob sich die Betriebszugehörigkeitsdauer von Personen, die im 2. Quartal 2003 aus Arbeitslosigkeit heraus eine mit Eingliederungszuschüssen...

This paper evaluates counselling programmes in an equilibrium matching model where workers are heterogeneous in skill levels. Job search effort, labour demand and wages are endogenous. When wages are bargained over, raising the effectiveness of or the access to counselling programmes pushes...

In spring 2005, the Ombud for Equal Treatment in Austria launched a campaign notifying employers and newspapers that gender preferences in job ads were illegal. At the time over 40% of vacancies on the nation's largest job board stated a gender preference; within a year the rate fell below 5%. We...