International courts have become a crucial element of protecting employee rights in recent decades. The ‘unorthodox' measures of the Hungarian Orbán government have provided a unique opportunity to test the effectiveness of international courts, since these national measures have been defying...

This paper tests whether the job security offered by stricter employment protection legislation (EPL) undermines positive compensating wage differentials that would otherwise be paid. Specifically, we ask whether industries with relatively more need for layoffs and labour flexibility have lower...

Consider an employer who wants her employee to work hard. As is well known from the efficiency wage literature, the employer must pay the (wealth-constrained) employee a positive rent to provide incentives for exerting unobservable effort. Alternatively, the employer could make effort observable...

This paper analyzed the OECD data on employment protection for 23 OECD countries over the time span 1990-2008 on the basis of alternative dynamic panel data models and panel causality tests and examines the validity of the neo-liberal argument that strictness of employment protection hurts labor...

Although the term ‘job quality' is not known to Australian law in any formal or technical sense, there are various ways in which labour regulation in Australia can be seen to have embraced the idea. These include the richly textured way in which industrial tribunals came to regulate minimum...

This chapter deals with the question of whether labour standards are less relevant or more relevant for the new world of work which is vastly different from the old world of work when most labour standards were first established. The various rationales for labour standards are first outlined....

This paper provides a first assessment of the causal impact of the 2018-2021 reform in Korea meant to combat its long working-hour culture. The reform consists of lowering the statutory limit on total weekly working hours from 68 to 52. We apply a difference-in-difference approach in which we...

Domestic work is the subject of an International Labour Organization (ILO) standard-setting exercise that is expected to generate an international Convention in June 2011. As a contribution to that process, this study addresses the working time dimensions of domestic work. Across the globe,...

When it was passed, the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act sought to address the “evils” of underpay and overwork by establishing a minimum wage and requiring premium overtime pay. However, today's low-wage, hourly workers more often face underwork than overwork. In this paper, we examine the...