This paper examines a labor law reform implemented in Portugal in 2009 which restricted the use of fixed-term contracts to reduce labor market segmentation. The reform targeted establishments created by large firms above a specific size threshold, covering about 15% of total employment. Drawing...

In most countries, the unemployed are entitled to unemployment benefits only if they have previously worked a minimum period of time. This institutional feature creates a sharp change at eligibility in the disutility from unemployment and may distort the duration of jobs. In this paper, we...

Local labour market concentration may influence firms' employment responses to minimum wages. We evaluate this hypothesis using comprehensive 1998-2007 data on China's manufacturing sector and about 1,400 hand-collected county-level minimum wages. We find that, consistently with monopsony views,...

Several countries extend collective bargaining agreements to entire sectors, therefore binding non-subscriber workers and employers. These extensions may address coordination issues but may also distort competition by imposing sector-specific minimum wages and other work conditions that are not...

Although activation services such as monitoring, training, or job subsidies have been shown to increase exits from unemployment, there is little comprehensive evidence about the effects of activation during recessions. Here we evaluate a large activation programme introduced in Portugal in 2012,...

How much do developing countries benefit from foreign investment? We contribute to this question by comparing the employment and wage practices of foreign and domestic firms in Brazil, using detailed matched firm-worker panel data. In order to control for unobserved worker differences, we...

The increased range and quality of China's exports is a major ongoing development in the international economy with potentially far-reaching effects. In this paper, on top of the direct effects of increased imports from China studied in previous research, we also measure the indirect labour...

This paper contributes to a deeper understanding of sector-level bargaining systems and their role for labour market performance. We compare two countries with seemingly similar collective bargaining systems, the Netherlands and Portugal, and document a number of features that may affect labour...

Since the global financial crisis, sector-level bargaining has come under renewed scrutiny. While in Southern Europe, the crisis raised concerns about the role of collective bargaining as an obstacle to labor market adjustment, in Northern Europe it was perceived more favourably and, according...