We use the novel anonymized Household Labour Force Survey (HLFS) microdata to analyze job finding rates and job separation rates in New Zealand. We find that individual characteristics, including age, gender, ethnicity and education have a significant impact on job finding and separation rates, even after controlling for other factors. We use a decomposition approach to analyze how the effects of individual characteristics on job finding and separation rates contribute to heterogeneity in employment outcomes. Overall, we find that higher separation rates of young workers play a disproportionate role in explaining heterogeneity of employment outcomes across age groups, while differences in finding rates are somewhat more important in explaining differences by education level. Both finding and separation rate differences are important in explaining differences across ethnicities. We also find some heterogeneous response of worker groups to business cycle after controlling for other factors. The results underscore the importance of well-targeted labor market support policies.

Law and Employment analyzes the effects of regulation and deregulation on Latin American labor markets and presents empirically grounded studies of the costs of regulation. Numerous labor regulations that were introduced or reformed in Latin America in the past thirty years have had important economic consequences. Nobel Prize-winning economist James J. Heckman and Carmen Pagés document the behavior of firms attempting to stay in business and be competitive while facing the high costs of complying with these labor laws. They challenge the prevailing view that labor market regulations affect only the distribution of labor incomes and have little or no impact on efficiency or the performance of labor markets. Using new micro-evidence, this volume shows that labor regulations reduce labor market turnover rates and flexibility, promote inequality, and discriminate against marginal workers. Along with in-depth studies of Colombia, Peru, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Jamaica, and Trinidad, Law and Employment provides comparative analysis of Latin American economies against a range of European countries and the United States. The book breaks new ground by quantifying not only the cost of regulation in Latin America, the Caribbean, and in the OECD, but also the broader impact of this regulation.

The OECD Employment Outlook 2013 looks at labour markets in the wake of the crisis. It also includes chapters employment protection legislation; benefit systems, employment and training programmes and re-employment earnings and skills afer job loss.

Traditionally, economic growth and business cycles have been treated independently. However, the dependence of GDP levels on its history of shocks, what economists refer to as “hysteresis,” argues for unifying the analysis of growth and cycles. In this paper, we review the recent empirical and theoretical literature that motivate this paradigm shift. The renewed interest in hysteresis has been sparked by the persistence of the Global Financial Crisis and fears of a slow recovery from the Covid-19 crisis. The findings of the recent literature have far-reaching conceptual and policy implications. In recessions, monetary and fiscal policies need to be more active to avoid the permanent scars of a downturn. And in good times, running a high-pressure economy could have permanent positive effects.

This report provides an overview of global and regional trends in employment, unemployment, labour force participation and productivity, as well as dimensions of job quality such as employment status, informal employment and working poverty. It also examines income and social developments, and provides an indicator of social unrest. Key findings are that are unemployment is projected to rise after a long period of stability, and that many people are working fewer paid hours than they would like or lack adequate access to paid work. The report also takes a close look at decent work deficits and persistent labour market inequalities, noting that income inequality is higher than previously thought.

Labor market deregulation, intended to boost productivity and employment, is one plausible, yet little studied, driver of the decline in labor shares that took place across most advanced economies since the early 1990s. This paper assesses the impact of job protection deregulation in a sample of 26 advanced economies over the period 1970-2015, using a newly constructed dataset of major reforms to employment protection legislation for regular contracts. We apply the local projection method to estimate the dynamic response of the labor share to our reform events at both the country and the country-industry levels. For the latter, we employ a differences-in-differences identification strategy using two identifying assumptions grounded in theory—namely that job protection deregulation should have larger negative effects in industries characterized by (i) a higher “natural” propensity to adjust the workforce, and (ii) a lower elasticity of substitution between capital and labor. We find a statistically significant, economically large and robust negative effect of deregulation on the labor share. In particular, illustrative back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that job protection deregulation may have contributed about 15 percent to the average labor share decline in advanced economies. Together with existing evidence regarding the macroeconomic gains from job protection and other labor market reforms, our results also point to the need for policymakers to address efficiency-equity trade-offs when designing such reforms.