The present paper studies whether labour market deregulation is correlated with employment creation in Italy and the decline of trade union power. Our hypothesis is that the correlation does not hold, and that flexible contracts facilitated the dichotomy between industry and tertiary, without...

This chapter assesses how models with search frictions have shaped our understanding of aggregate labor market outcomes in two contexts: business cycle fluctuations and long-run (trend) changes. We first consolidate data on aggregate labor market outcomes for a large set of OECD countries. We...

This paper identifies the labour market impact of the Great Recession on immigrants compared to natives and how this relationship has evolved since the downturn. We find that the employment penalty suffered by immigrant workers, relative to native workers, increased significantly over the Irish...

This paper evaluates the effects for the Spanish case of allowing greater flexibility regarding the weekly hours worked on the working week, employment and productivity. A baseline model economy is calibrated to reproduce the cross-sectional distribution of workweeks across plants, as well as...

High employment growth has sustained Israel’s high GDP growth in recent decades, but demographic change and labour market duality put future growth at risk. Policy action is required to stimulate employment and raise labour productivity, especially among population groups with weaker labour...

Over the past decade, the share of jobs not controlled by the state has increased considerably, whilst employment in agriculture has declined, against the backdrop of ongoing urbanisation. Over 200 million people have been drawn into urban areas through official or unofficial migration, despite...

We examine the link between labour market developments and new technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and software in 16 European countries over the period 2011- 2019. Using data for occupations at the 3-digit level in Europe, we find that on average employment shares have increased...

Market economies experience high rates of job creation and job destruction in almost every time period and sector. Each year, many businesses expand and many others contract. New businesses constantly enter, while others abruptly exit or gradually disappear. Amidst the turbulence of business...

At the onset of the COVID pandemic, the U.S. economy suddenly and swiftly lost 20 million jobs. Over the next two years, the economy has been on the recovery path. We assess the labor market two years into the COVID crisis. We show that early employment dynamics were almost entirely driven by...