Although New Keynesian models with labor market frictions found an increase in unemployment and a decrease in labor market tightness in response to a positive technology shock (which appears to be in line with recent empirical findings), the volatilities of unemployment and labor market...

Three features of real-life reforms of dual employment protection legislation (EPL) systems are particularly hard to study through the lens of standard labor-market search models: (i) the excess job turnover implied by dual EPL, (ii) the nonretroactive nature of EPL reforms, and (iii) the...

This paper uses the Italian Social Security employer-employee panel to study the effects of the Italian reform of 1990 on worker and job flows. We exploit the fact that this reform increased unjust dismissal costs for firms below 15 employees, while leaving dismissal costs unchanged for bigger...

We study individual job-separations and their associated destination states for all individuals in the private sector in Denmark for the period 1980 to 1995 and account for the cyclical flows. We find that individual and workplace characteristics as well as business cycle effects are important...

This paper is intended to make a contribution to the empirical literature explaining the rise ofunemployment since the 1970s in western economies by means of interactions betweenshocks and institutions. The contribution is twofold. First, the impact of a general feature ofdeveloped economies...

This paper investigates the social preferences over labor market flexibility, in a general equilibrium model of dynamic labor demand where the productivity of active firms evolves as a Geometric Brownian motion. A key result demonstrated is that how the economy responds to shocks, i.e....

In this paper, we present a matching model with adverse selection that explains why flows into and out of unemployment are much lower in Europe compared to North America, while employment-to-employment flows are similar in the two continents. In the model, firms use discretion in terms of whom...

This paper investigates the effect of firing costs on total factor productivity (TFP) and resource allocation. Exploiting heterogeneous changes in firing costs across employee types in Belgium, we find that increasing firing costs reduce firm-level TFP. Firms facing a net increase in firing...

In preparation for the 1998 soccer World Cup, France banned the use of soccer balls made with child labor. As a result of that ban, Baden Sports, the company that supplied the soccer balls, closed down its Pakistani soccer ball operations, which used child labor, and moved production to China,...