This paper attempts to investigate the impact of sectoral wage laws in South Africa. Specifically, we examine the impact of minimum wage laws promulgated in the Retail, Domestic work, Forestry, Security, and Taxi sectors using 15 waves of biannual Labour Force Survey data for the 2000–2007...

This paper presents a case study on reforming a very dysfunctional labor market with a deep insider-outsider divide, namely the Spanish case. We show how a dual market, with permanent and temporary employees, makes real reform much harder, and leads to purely marginal changes that do not alter...

We provide updated evidence on the effects of living wage laws in U.S. cities, relative to the earlier research covering only the first six or seven years of existence of these laws. There are some challenges to updating the evidence, as the CPS data on which it relies changed geographic coding...

This paper analyzes whether the two major labor market reforms implemented in Spain in the 1990s to reduce the share of temporary employment succeed in promoting flows into permanent employment. The 1994 reform severely restricted temporary contracts and the 1997 reform introduced a new...

The present paper estimates the effect over participation outcomes of the new reform to the pension system made in Chile in 2008, using a difference in difference matching estimation. The main results found that the treated group shows a higher withdrawal from the labor market and that they...

This paper examines responses to questions on wage setting features in Slovenia’s Wage Dynamics Network (WDN) survey in the institutional and macroeconomic context of the Slovene economy. The question on collective wage agreement did not capture the prevailing institutional arrangement of...

The reaction of the German labor market to the Great Recession 2008/09 was relatively mild – especially compared to other countries. The reason lies not only in the specific type of the recession – which was favorable for the German economy structure – but also in a series of labor market...

A major labour market challenge following the Great Recession is to avoid an increase in long-term unemployment and thus the structural unemployment rate. Active labour market policies may play an important role in this respect. We consider these issues with outset in Denmark which is a country...

This paper contributes to the policy debate on minimum wage by highlighting its role in enforcing compliance with fiscal rules in economies where underreporting of earnings is widespread. First, I propose a simple model exploring the interaction between the minimum wage and underreporting of...