The main objective of passive employment policies is to guarantee a certain level of consumption and well-being for workers who lose their jobs. These policies also aim to assist the unemployed in searching for a new job and to improve the matching between employers and workers to generate...

The objective of the paper is to estimate the impact of an increase of dismissal penalties, implemented by the 1988 Brazilian constitution, on the duration of employment spells. After a simple comparison of estimates of this variable in periods pre- and post-1988, we made use of two alternative...

The frequency of labor inspections in Brazil increased in the late 1990s. In the years that followed, between 2003 and 2007, formal employment expanded significantly in the country. This paper examines whether these city-level changes in labor inspections could be a significant factor...

The objective of the paper is to estimate the impact of an increase of dismissal penalties, implemented by the 1988 Brazilian constitution, on the duration of employment spells. After a simple comparison of estimates of this variable in periods pre and post 1988 we made use of two alternative...

We offer a decomposition for the variance of the current unemployment rate that not only measures the contributions of labor market flows but also of the approximation error embedded in other decompositions that use surrogates for the current rate. Using data for the United States and Brazil,...

We implement decompositions of cyclical unemployment in a large developing country using the conventional 3-states and a 4-states representation of the labor market, where in the latter we subdivide the employment state into formal and informal forms of employment. This allows a richer analysis...