Even though institutions are created to protect workers, they may interfere with labor market functioning, raise unemployment, and end up being circumvented by informal contracts. This paper uses Brazilian microeconomic data to show that the institutional changes introduced by the 1988...

We quantify the extent to which public-sector employment crowds out private-sector employment using specially assembled datasets for a large cross-section of developing and advanced countries, and discuss the implications for countries in the Middle East, North Africa, Caucasus and Central Asia....

Using household level data for France from 1990 to 2000, we estimate a relationship between wages and unemployment taking into account compositional, time and regional effects. We show that this relationship shifted outward during the 1990s most likely because of a structural change in workers'...

This paper estimates the effects of offshoring on productivity in U.S. manufacturing industries between 1992 and 2000, using instrumental variables estimation to address the potential endogeneity of offshoring. It finds that service offshoring has a significant positive effect on productivity in...

This study explores the effects of labor and product market deregulation on employment growth. Our empirical results, based on an OECD country panel from 1990-2004, suggest that lower levels of product and labor market regulation foster employment growth, including through sizable interaction...

The recent media and political attention on service outsourcing from developed to developing countries gives the impression that outsourcing is exploding. As a result, workers in industrial countries are anxious about job losses. This paper aims to establish what are the hypes and what are the...

This paper uses micro data from the German Socio-Economic Panel to document that the wage structure in West Germany was remarkably stable during 1984-97, with little variation over time in wage or earnings inequality between and within different skill groups. Empirical evidence suggests that...

Unemployment pressures among nationals are emerging in the Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf (GCC). 2 At a time when a rapidly growing number of young nationals are entering the labor force and governments are no longer able to act as employers of first and last resort, the...

Legally mandated reductions in the workweek can be either a constraint on individuals' choice or a tool to coordinate individuals' preferences for lower work hours. We confront these two hypotheses by studying the consequences of the workweek reduction in France from 39 to 35 hours, which was...

Euro-area real wages have decelerated sharply in the last 20 years, but this has not yet translated into visibly lower unemployment or faster growth. Weak output growth after such a cost shock is somewhat puzzling and has led some to question the benefits of wage moderation. By isolating...