From the mid-1980s until 2005 the German labour market was characterised by continuous deregulation. In the period of an improving German labour market, the German governments have since imposed measures to re-regulate the labour market in order to strengthen employees' rights. At the same time...

This paper explores empirically the economic validity of the relatively limited approach to the regulation of employment protection pursued in the UK over the last three decades and within the European Union more recently. It does so by comparing the UK's manufacturing labour productivity...

Under existing American labor, employment, and tax laws, in any one work relationship, a worker is either an “employee” or an “independent contractor.” This binary classification of workers, and the high-stakes outcomes it produces, have been challenged by “gig economy,” or “online...

The paper summarizes the rationale and contents of a conference held at the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei in December 2020, celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Italian Statuto dei lavoratori (Charter of Workers' Rights): a reform that represents an important advancement in Italian civic...

We run a large-scale natural field experiment to evaluate alternative strategies to enforce compliance with the law. The experiment varies the text of mailings sent to potential evaders of TV license fees. We find a strong alert effect of mailings, leading to a substantial increase in...

Although legal sanctions are often non-deterrent, we frequently observe compliance with 'mild laws'. A possible explanation is that the incentives to comply are shaped not only by legal, but also by social sanctions. This paper employs a novel experimental approach to study the link between...

The deterrent effect of law enforcement rests on the link between the actual and the perceived detection risk. We study the role of word of mouth for this linkage. Our approach makes use of micro data on compliance with TV license fees allowing us to distinguish between households who have been...

We run a large-scale natural field experiment to evaluate alternative strategies to enforce compliance with the law. The experiment varies the text of mailings sent to potential evaders of TV license fees. We find a strong alert effect of mailings, leading to a substantial increase in...

The deterrent effect of law enforcement rests on the link between the actual and the perceived detection risk. We study the role of word of mouth for this linkage. Our approach makes use of micro data on compliance with TV license fees allowing us to distinguish between households who have been...