According to French law, employers have to pay at least six months salary to employees whose seniority exceeds two years in case of unfair dismissal. We show, relying on data, that this regulation entails a hike in severance payments at two-year seniority which induces a significant rise in the...

Using a recent survey of immigrants to France, we provide a detailed analysis of the educational attainment and labor market performance of various sub-population groups in France. Our results indicate that immigrants to France are less educated than the native born and that these differences...

This paper delves into the recent events that led to the formation of the housing bubble in Spain and the resulting structural change that is arguably needed to put the economy back into the right track. For this purpose we calibrate a model with different equilibria descriptive of the labor...

We use longitudinal individual wage and employment data in France and the United States to investigate the effect of changes in the real minimum wage rate on an individual's employment status. We focus on workers employed at wages close enough to the minimum in a reference year as to be illegal...

Short-time work programs were revived by the Great Recession. To understand their operating mechanisms, we first provide a model showing that short-time work may save jobs in firms hit by strong negative revenue shocks, but not in less severely-hit firms, where hours worked are reduced, without...

This paper examines whether immigrants increase the likelihood of unemployment among native-born workers in the European Union. Earlier papers measure the presence of immigrants in the local labor market by computing the share of the foreigners in specific regions. This paper, instead, utilizes...

We combine micro and macro unemployment duration data to study the effects of the business cycle on the outflow from unemployment. We allow the cycle to affect individual exit probabilities of unemployed workers as well as the composition of the total inflow into unemployment. We estimate the...

We use longitudinal individual wage, hours, and employment data to investigate the effect of the February 1, 1982 mandatory reduction of weekly working hours in France. Just after François Mitterrand's election in May 1981, the government decided to increase the minimum wage by 5%. Then, as...

"This paper studies the effect of unemployment benefits on the unemployment and subsequent employment duration using individual data from the European Community Household Panel, for France, Germany, and the UK. The empirical analysis is based on a two-state mixed proportional hazard model...