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作者:Faggio, Giulia; Nickell, Stephen
作者单位:University of London; London School Economics & Political Science; University of Oxford
摘要:Market work per person of working age differs widely across the OECD countries and there have been some significant changes in the last forty years. How to explain this pattern? Taxes are part of the story but much remains to be explained. The story favoured by Alesina et al. (2005) is that the nexus of strong unions, generous welfare and social democracy implies both high taxes and pressure in favour of work-sharing in response to adverse shocks. This is not borne out in Scandinavian countrie...
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作者:Kahn, Lawrence M.
作者单位:Cornell University; IZA Institute Labor Economics
摘要:This article uses 1994-8 International Adult Literacy Survey microdata for Canada, Finland, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the UK and the US to study the impact of employment protection laws (EPL) on joblessness and temporary employment by demographic group. More stringent EPL raises relative non-employment rates for youth, immigrants, and, possibly, women, controlling for demographic variables and country dummies. For wage and salary workers, EPL raises the relative incidence of tempora...
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作者:Autor, David H.; Kerr, William R.; Kugler, Adriana D.
作者单位:Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); National Bureau of Economic Research; Harvard University; University of Houston System; University of Houston; Centre for Economic Policy Research - UK; IZA Institute Labor Economics
摘要:Theory predicts that mandated employment protection may reduce productivity by distorting production choices. We use the adoption of wrongful-discharge protection by state courts in the US from 1970 to 1999 to evaluate the empirical link between dismissal costs and productivity. Drawing on establishment-level data from the Census Bureau, our estimates suggest that wrongful-discharge protection reduces employment flows and firm entry rates. Moreover, plants engage in capital deepening and exper...
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作者:Oswald, Andrew J.; Powdthavee, Nattavudh
作者单位:University of Warwick; University of London
摘要:Is affluence a good thing? The book The Challenge of Affluence by Avner Offer (2006) argues that economic prosperity weakens self-control and undermines human well-being. Consistent with a pessimistic view, we show that psychological distress has been rising through time in modern Great Britain. Taking over-eating as an example, our data reveal that half the British population view themselves as overweight, and that happiness and mental health are worse among fatter people in Britain and Germa...
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作者:Koeniger, Winfried; Prat, Julien
作者单位:IZA Institute Labor Economics; University of Bonn; University of Vienna
摘要:Why are firm and job turnover rates so similar across OECD countries? We argue that this may be due to the joint regulation of product and labour markets. For our analysis, we build a stochastic equilibrium model with search frictions and heterogeneous multiple-worker firms. This allows us to distinguish firm entry and exit from hiring and firing in a model with equilibrium unemployment. We show that firing costs, sunk entry costs and bureaucratic flow costs have countervailing effects on firm...
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作者:MacLeod, W. Bentley; Nakavachara, Voraprapa
作者单位:Columbia University; IZA Institute Labor Economics; University of Southern California
摘要:The extent of government in private contractual relationships is a vexing public policy issue. This article explores, both theoretically and empirically, the degree to which such intervention may enhance employment. Economists traditionally have held that interventions such as wrongful discharge protections simply undo the original intent of the parties to an employment contract. We find that both good faith as well as implied contract exceptions to employment-at-will may enhance employment, p...
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作者:Cahuc, Pierre; Koeniger, Winfried
作者单位:heSam Universite; Universite Pantheon-Sorbonne; University of Bonn; IZA Institute Labor Economics
摘要:Employment protection legislation (EPL) is an important labour market policy whose strictness differs greatly across OECD countries. The collection of articles in this Feature provides new theoretical and empirical results which highlight the impact of EPL on productivity, job and firm turnover, (un)employment and the incidence of temporary contracts. Importantly, the effect of EPL is shown to differ across types of workers and firms. This yields new insights on the incentives for labour marke...
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作者:Messina, Julian; Vallanti, Giovanna
作者单位:Universitat de Girona; IZA Institute Labor Economics
摘要:We exploit homogeneous firm level data of manufacturing and non-manufacturing industries to study the impact of firing restrictions on job flow dynamics across 14 European countries. Our results suggest that more stringent firing laws dampen the response of job destruction to the cycle, thus making job turnover less counter-cyclical. Moreover, stricter EPL reduces both the creation and destruction of jobs in declining sectors relative to expanding sectors, implying that faster trend growth att...