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This paper looks at the trade off between investment incentives and exit costs for the location of foreign direct investment (FDI). This issue does not appear to have been tackled in much detail in the literature. The analysis considers the effect of profit taxation (as a measure of investment incentives) and an index of hiring and firing costs (proxying exit costs) on the location of US outward FDI in 33 host countries. The results suggest that US FDI, in particular in manufacturing is negatively affected by the level of profit taxation and exit costs. Hence, if countries want to attract FDI it may not suffice that incentives are provided in order to ease the entry of multinationals. Instead, it also appears to be important that exit costs are at a level attractive to multinationals. In other words, multinationals may not check into an attractive looking Hotel California type host country if it is difficult to leave.

n this paper, I analyze the pros and cons of implementing structural reforms of the labor market in booms vs. recessions, in light of considerations of social efficiency, political viability, and macroeconomic fine tuning. While the optimal timing of a reform depends on the relative importance of several conflicting effects, it seems clear that a reform should be accompanied by an expansionary macroeconomic policy. This makes structural reform more problematic in the context of the European Monetary Union.

Macroeconomic shocks and labour-market institutions jointly determine employment growth and economic performance. The effect of shocks depends on the nature of these intitutions and the effect of institutional change depends on the macroeconomic environment. It follows that a given set of institutions may be appropriate at certain times in some countries while not appropriate elsewhere. We derive a dynamic model of labour demand in which the effect of firing costs on labour demand depends on the macroeconomic environment: When the level of macroeconomic activity is expected to drop and/or the trend rate of productivity growth is small, a rise in firing costs affects mainly (and adversely) the hiring decision and not the firing decision. This makes firing costs harmful when they may appear to be most appropriate. The intuition behind these results is quite straightforward: When managers fear that demand may fall in the future they value the right to fire workers. It follows that by making this option more costly, firing costs reduce the value of workers with adverse consequences for hiring and firing.

We analyse the consequences of an increase in the supply of highly educated workers on relative and real wages in a search model where wages are set by Nash-bargaining. The key insight is that an increase in the supply of highly educated workers improves the firms’ outside option. As a consequence, the real wage of all workers decreases in the short-run. Since this decline is more pronounced for less educated workers, wage inequality increases. In the long-run a better educated work force induces firms to invest more in physical capital. Wage inequality and real wages of highly educated workers increase while real wages of less educated workers may decrease. These results are consistent with the US experience in the 70s and 80s. Based upon differences in legal employment protection we also provide an explanation for the diverging evolution of real and relative wages in Continental Europe.

When a firing litigation is taken to court, only the characteristics of the employees’ misconduct should be relevant for the judge’s decision. Using data from an Italian bank this Paper shows that, instead, local labour market conditions influence the court’s decision: the same misconduct episode may be considered sufficient for firing in a tight labour market but insufficient otherwise. This finding is obtained after taking carefully into consideration the non-random selection of firing litigation for trial. The existence of a judge’s bias is relevant for at least two research fields. For macroeconomists it suggests that higher unemployment rates may increase firing costs via the effect on courts’ decision criteria; thus, the real extent of firing rigidities cannot be assessed without considering the role of courts. For labour law scholars, this finding is important because, following traditional principles, the law should be applied in the same way for all citizens and over the entire national territory.

Optimal layoff rules in closed form are derived for all workers in a firm that downsizes under uncertainty and faces heterogeneous firing costs. The theoretical model predicts that the firm displaces workers with low firing costs, low expected future productivity growth, and low layoff option values. The empirical analysis based on personnel records from a Dutch aircraft building company that went bankrupt in 1996 shows that workers with high uncertainty associated with higher than average expected productivity growth are most likely to be retained.

During the 1980s, many European countries introduced fixed-term contracts to fight high and persistent levels of unemployment. Although these contracts have been widely used, unemployment has remained about the same after fifteen years. This paper builds a theoretical model to reconcile these facts. We analyse the labour market effect of the introduction of fixed-term contracts and the firm''s choice of contracts are studied. Permanent contracts are the standard way to offer incentives, but fixed-term contracts are cheaper. This generates an externality, which can make employment higher in the system with only permanent contracts. As a consequence, from a social point of view, the share of fixed-term contracts is too large. Increases in the renewal rate of fixed-term contracts into permanent contracts lead to higher employment levels. Finally, the model highlights the interactions between different rigidities in the labour market. Aggregate employment and the share of temporary contracts are affected in the same way by the firing costs and the flexibility of wages.

Firing costs are often blamed for unemployment. This paper investigates this well spread belief. The main points are two. First, firing costs are modelled in an efficiency wage model to capture their effects on employment through wages. Secondly, dismissal conflicts are modelled explicitly. In the context of imperfectly observable effort, a double moral hazard problem can arise and in turn firing costs reduced employment because they increase the rent to be paid to workers. The determinants of the double moral hazard problem such as the imprecise definition of dismissal causes are analysed. The main policy conclusion is that focus should move onto the clarification of the different causes of dismissal to minimise the room of interpretation. If so, then high enough severance payments in case of ''unfair'' dismissals can actually have a punishment role and prevent the double moral hazard problem.

A matching model in the line of Mortensen and Pissarides (1994) is augmented with a lowskill labor market and firing costs. It is shown that even with flexible wages unemployment is higher among the low-skilled and increases with skill-biased technological change. The two main reasons are that their jobs have a shorter life expectancy than in the labor market for the skilled, increasing the inflow into unemployment, and that the jobs are less profitable, resulting in a smaller outflow from unemployment. Firing costs increase employment security among existing jobs, but the unskilled are likely to profit less than the skilled, and the availability of new jobs decreases in both sectors. Within the present framework the effect of firing costs on unemployment is ambiguous, but unemployment spells are shown to be longer with higher firing costs. The implications of explicitly introducing business cycles into the model are considered, too.

This paper develops a model of job creation and job destruction in a growing economy with embodied technical progress, that we use to analyze the political support for employment protection legislations such as the ones that are observed in most European countries. We analyze the possibility of Condorcet cycles due to the fact that workers about to become unemployed prefer both an increase and a reduction in firing costs over the status quo. Despite this problem, we show the existence of local, and sometimes global majority winners. In voting in favour of employment protection, incumbent employees trade off lower living standards (because employment protection maintains workers in less productive activities) against longer job duration. We show that the gains from, and consequently the political support for employment protection (as defined by maximum job tenure) are larger, the lower the rate of creative destruction and the larger the worker's bargaining power. Numerical simulations suggest a hump-shaped response of firing costs to these variables, as well as a negative impact of exogenous turnover on employment protection.

This paper evaluates the effects on employment, job turnover and productivity of a labor market reform in Spain that eliminated dismissal costs for fixed-term contracts. Our empirical results are based on a panel of 2356 Spanish manufacturing firms for the period 1982-1993. We postulate and estimate a dynamic labor demand model with indefinite and fixed-term labor contracts. Our estimations use data on severance payments to identify when negative changes in employment have been associated with costly dismissals. Experiments using the estimated model show important positive effects of the reform on employment (between 2.5% and 4.5%) and job turnover (between five and seven percentage points). However, its effects on productivity and the value of a firm are negligible. This contrasts with the sizeable increases in output and v3.Iue under a hypothetical reduction in firing costs for all type of contracts. Compared with this alternative reform, the introduction of temporary contracts leads to excess turnover and employment of workers with low firm-specific experience.

This paper proposes a model of job creation and destruction of the search and matching type. The model is able to replicate the magnitude and cyclical behavior of job creation, destruction and reallocation rates in a segmented labor market like the one in Spain. The motivation is the similarity in the cyclical behavior of US and Spanish job reallocation (JR) rates despite the differences in job security regulations. This behavior contrasts to what is observed in the rest of continental Europe, where JR is acyclical. The model, by introducing a segmented labor market, makes is plausible to obtain a countercyclical JR rate in a high firing cost economy. In addition, we quantify the effects of a 40 % reduction in the firing costs associated with permanent contracts. The main results are (i) negligible effects on permanent job destruction rates, (ii) significant effects on job creation and destruction (permanetltemporary) cyclical behavior, (iii) a 57 % increase in the job conversion rate from temporary into permanetjobs and a 12 % reduction in the temporary employment rate.

Despite stringent dismissal restrictions in most European countries, rates of job creation and destruction are remarkably similar across European and North American labour markets. This paper shows that relative-wage compression is conducive to higher employer-initiated job turnover, and argues that wage-setting institutions and job security provisions differ across countries in ways that are both consistent with rough uniformity of job turnover statistics and readily explained by intuitive theoretical considerations. When viewed as a component of the mix of institutional differences in Europe and North America, European dismissal restrictions are essential to a proper interpretation of both similar patterns in job turnover, and marked differences in unemployment flows.

This paper develops a simple model of employment, non-statutory redundancy pay and wage determination. An interesting feature of this model is that the contract curve is vertical. Some of the predictions of the model are confronted with the available British data on non-statutory firing costs, from the 1990 Workplace Industrial Relations Survey. The estimates indicate: first, that bargaining over redundancy pay is more prevalent in plants with a strong union presence; second, that bargaining over redundancy pay has no impact on recent employment variation for plants in the sample; and third, that financial performance is unaffected by manual bargaining, but is positively associated with non-manual bargaining.

This paper develops a model to analyse the implications of firing costs on incentives for R&D and international specialization. The key idea is that, to avoid paying firing costs, the country with a rigid labour market will tend to produce relatively secure goods, at late stages in their product life cycles. With international trade, an international product cycle emerges where, roughly, new goods are first produced in the low-firing cost country, and then move to the high-firing cost country. The paper shows that in the closed economy, an increase in firing costs does not necessarily imply a reduction in R&D; it crucially depends on the riskiness of R&D activity relative to productive activity. In the open economy, however, an increase in firing costs is much more likely to reduce R&D intensity.

The model developed in this paper examines the relationship between firing costs and unemployment in a simple two-period model with uncertainty. Where there are long-term employment relationships, and where risk-averse workers and risk-neutral firms bargain over wages and firing costs, average unemployment is unlikely to be affected by statutory firing costs, although firms' profits will decline if the statutory level exceeds the bargained level. In a unionised sector with no bargaining over firing costs, the presence of statutory firing costs reduces employment distortions associated with trade unions. However, where there are no gains to employers to long-term labour relationships, the introduction of mandated firing costs will be associated with a higher incidence of temporary employment contracts and short-term jobs.

We study a number of mechanisms through which an economy can be stuck at a high unemployment equilibrium because a poor labour market is associated with support for poor policy. These mechanisms are consistent with the relative scarcity of measures that have been undertaken to cure unemployment. The message of the paper is that curing the European unemployment problem is a difficult task because a lot of skill is required to avoid political pitfalls.

This paper formulates a discrete-time model to study the effects of firing costs on labour demand by a firm facing linear adjustment costs under serially independent productivity shocks. We show that a rise in firing costs reduces the firm's marginal propensities to hire and fire, and may increase or decrease its average steady-state labour demand.

This paper constructs a theoretical model to study the effects on employment of the introduction of flexible labour contracts (i.e. with low firing costs), which occurred in many European countries in the 1980s, which it then tests on Spanish data. The model predicts that such contracts increase the size of the employment response to aggregate shocks, while decreasing its persistence, and that employment overshoots its long-run level at the time these contracts are introduced. Econometric estimates of labour demand based on a panel of large Spanish industrial firms are consistent with several of the model's implications, in particular the increase in the cyclical response of employment.

We analyze the political support for employment protection legislation. Unlike my previous work on the same topic, this paper pays a lot of attention to the role of obsolescence in the growth process. In voting in favour of employment protection, incumbent employees trade off lower living standards (because employment protection maintains workers in less productive activities) against longer job duration. The support for employment protection will then depend on the value of the latter relative to the cost of the former. We highlight two key deeterminants of this trade-off: first, the workers' bargaining power, second, the economy's growth rate-more precisely its rate of creative destruction.

This paper develops a model of job creation and job destruction in a growing economy with embodied technical progress, that we use to analyze the political support for employment protection legislations such as the ones that are observed in most European countries. We analyze the possibility of Condorcet cycles due to the fact that workers about to become unemployed prefer both an increase and a reduction in firing costs over the status quo. Despite this problem, we show the existence of local, and sometimes global majority winners. In voting in favour of employment protection, incumbent employees trade off lower living standards (because employment protection maintains workers in less productive activities) against longer job duration. We show that the gains from, and consequently the political support for employment protection (as defined by maximunjob tenure) are larger, the lower the rate of creative destruction and the larger the worker's bargaining power. Numerical simulations suggest a hump- shaped response of firing costs to these variables, as well as negative impact of exogeneous turnover on employment protection.