In this paper we point out that the theoretical predictions concern-ing Employment Protection Legislation (EPL) are not fully confirmed by empirical evidence in Italy, a strict EPL country in the nine-ties, according to OECD indexes. In particular, worker and job flow rates are remarkably high,...

The claim that the unemployed should be allocated to ‘government as employer of last resort’ schemes (like the WPA in the US in the 1930s) has major flaws. One flaw is the assumption that public sector work of this sort is less inflationary than private sector employment. A second flaw is...

This paper looks at some of the fundamental ideas in contemporary economics such as the basic economic problem, opportunity cost and allocation a person is expected to encounter when they are first introduced to economic theory. It attempts to explain how the manner in which these concepts are...

Unionists and politicians frequently claim that globalization lowers employment protection of workers. This paper tests this hypothesis in a panel of 28 OECD countries from 1985 to 2003, differentiating between three dimensions of globalization and two labor market segments. While overall...

Poaching key employees from close competitors has become a prevalent and controversial issue. This paper examines the condition under which employee poaching can be either predatory or competitive, and discusses its implications for the enforcement of post-employment non-compete agreements. When...

Traditional theoretical literature which neglects the benefits of stabilization policies (e.g., Lucas 1987 and 2003) ultimately relies on the small impact that macroeconomic volatility has on aggregate income and consumption. In this article, we argue that such an approach is both theoretically...

The Chinese labour market has undergone an extensive restructuring in the last four-and-a-half decades, following the start of the economic reforms, and the open door policy for foreign investment in 1978, under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping. The nature of employment contracts, labour market...

“Employment and sustainable development: education, training and R&D in the regulation of the labour market” Ilona Kovács & Margarida Chagas Lopes Abstract Sustainable development has been considered in various discourses as the answer to the economic, social and ecological crisis. However,...

Women workers constitute one third of the world labour force performing two thirds of working hours but their contributory role remains invisible. Sericulture is such an activity where most of the work is performed by women alone in terms of operations performed and time invested. Despite...

This paper investigates whether and to what extent state-level differences in business taxes influence the location decisions and labor demand of multi-establishment firms. In the United States each state administers its own unemployment insurance (UI) program, and cross-state variation leads to...