Raising South Africa's low employment rate to levels seen in emerging market or advanced economy peers could raise GDP per capita by 50 to 60 percent and reduce income inequality dramatically in the long term. By putting further strain on an already fragile labor market, Covid-19 has raised the...

Individual labour productivities are often unobservable for firms when hiring new workers. Job protection may prevent firms ex post from using information about labour productivities. We show that a binding minimum wage introduced in the presence of job protection will lead to lower unemployment...

Measures of individual happiness, or well-being, can guide labor market policies. Individual unemployment, as well as the rate of unemployment in society, have a negative effect on happiness. In contrast, employment protection and unemployment benefits can contribute to happiness - though when...

Although labor market duality is a widespread phenomenon in many OECD countries, there is yet no research consent on the effects of duality on labor market dynamics and performance. Against this background, using a New Keynesian model with unemployment, this paper theoretically investigates the...

This article draws from different theoretical and empirical literatures to analyse the role of socioeconomic and regulatory conditions on immigrant-native gaps across four outcomes; unemployment, monthly earnings, underemployment, and precarious contracts. The empirical results suggest that...

Labor market segmentation refers to a salient divide between secure and insecure jobs and is related to problems in important areas, including macro‐economic efficiency, workers' wellbeing and repercussions for social cohesion. European countries have started a new wave of labor market reforms...

We investigate the effects of Chinese import competition on transitions into and out of employment using comparable worker-level data for 14 European countries. Our results indicate that, on average, Chinese imports are associated with an increased probability that employed workers become...

This paper provides an overview of recent research on dual labour markets. Theoretical and empirical contributions on the labour-market effects of dual employment protection legislation are revisited, as well as factors behind its resilience and policies geared towards correcting its negative...

We explore the interaction between labour market reforms and financial frictions. Our study combines a new cross-country reform database on labour market reforms with matched firm-bank data for nine euro area countries over the period 1999 to 2013. While we find that labour market reforms are...