market institutions on informal economic activity. The measure of informal economic activity is taken from Schneider et al …. (2010), the most comprehensive study to date. The data on institutions, which cover employment protection legislation (EPL …), the tax wedge, the unemployment benefit level, unemployment benefit duration and union density, are assembled at the IZA …

Switzerland, traditionally a ‘zero unemployment’ economy, has seen an unprecedented rise in joblessness in the 1990s … although unemployment fell again to a rather low level after 1997. This paper tests whether Switzerland experienced a negative … shock and find that they were rigid, which can explain the relative unemployment increase for this group. Finally, I test …

The evolution of Spanish unemployment has been quite idiosyncratic. The full employment levels of the early seventies … were followed by unemployment rates that were the highest within the OECD countries in the aftermath of the oil price … shocks. While unemployment was extremely persistent in most of the eighties and nineties, it experienced its sharpest decline …

We evaluate the effects of international outsourcing and labor taxation on wage formation and equilibrium unemployment … reduce equilibrium unemployment of low-skilled workers both in the presence and absence of labor taxation. In the presence of … outsourcing, wage tax, tax exemption and payroll tax have an ambiguous effect on equilibrium unemployment. Increasing the degree …

composition of the labor force, between-groups wage inequality and the level of unemployment. The main result is that a labor … labor force, there is higher unemployment among low-experience workers, they do not accumulate enough on-the-job human …