Toward a theory of labor market institutions

Standard economic analysis holds that labor market rigidities are harmful for job creation and typically increase unemployment. But many orthodox reforms of the labor market have proved difficult to implement because of political opposition. For these reasons it is important to explain why we observe such regulations. In this paper I outline a theory of how they may arise and why they fit together. This theory is fully developed in a forthcoming book (Saint-Paul (2000)), to which the reader is referred for further details.