Effect Of Employment Protection Research Articles

Employment protection legislation and R&D investment

This paper examines how employment protection legislation influences corporate R&D investment. With a sample of 113,228 observations across 23 OECD countries from 2001 to 2018, I document that firms in strong employment protection legislation have lower R&D expenditure and investment efficiency. In addition, I find that the effect of employment protection on R&D expenditure is stronger in financially constrained firms but the effect of employment protection on R&D investment efficiency is stronger in financially unconstrained firms.

The Effect of Employment Protection on Firms' Worker Selection

The Effect of Employment Protection on Firms' Worker Selection

Improving Bargaining Power or Putting Safety First? Ownership Structure and the Effect of Labor Market Regulation on Leverage

While previous work suggests two competing explanations for the effect of labor market regulation on firms’ demand for debt, our results reconcile both the “strategic use of debt” and “financial flexibility” view. Exploiting staggered changes to labor laws in 28 OECD countries, we find that the average causal effect of employment protection on firm financial leverage is close to zero but hides much heterogeneity depending on firm ownership structure. We posit that a regulatory-induced increase in labor power (i) gives a firm a strategic incentive to raise more debt, but also (ii) increases operating leverage and the risk of financial distress that could encourage firms with poorly diversified blockholders to react with a more conservative financial policy compared to widely-held firms. Examining non-financial, non-utility listed firms over a 20-year period, we find that higher ownership concentration mitigates the positive effect of labor power on financial leverage, making the relationship less positive or more negative. This result does not seem to be driven by pretreatment differences among firms and is robust against a wide variety of tests. Our results highlight the importance of considering ownership structure in studying firms’ capital structure decisions.

Employment Protection and Misallocation of Resources Across Plants: International Evidence

Employment protection affects aggregate productivity via several channels in potentially contradicting ways, which makes it difficult to establish the relationship between the two. This study focuses on the misallocation of production factors across plants, which has been shown in past studies to substantially reduce aggregate productivity. The study provides new evidence on the effect of employment protection on resource misallocation using a large dataset of manufacturing plants covering more than 90 countries. For measuring misallocation, I use the within‐industry dispersion of the marginal product of labor and total factor productivity. The results show that higher cost of dismissing redundant workers is positively associated with misallocation. The effect of dismissal cost is especially larger in industries that have greater demand for adjusting labor. More specifically, the effect is larger in industries that intrinsically have higher layoff rate, and in industries that have large positive or negative sales growth rates.

The Effect of Employment Protection on Teacher Effort

In 2004, the Chicago Public Schools and the Chicago Teachers Union signed a new collective bargaining agreement that gave principals the flexibility to dismiss probationary teachers (those with fewer than 5 years of experience) for any reason and without the hearing process typical in many urban districts. Results suggest that the policy reduced annual teacher absences by roughly 10% and reduced the incidence of frequent absences by 25%. The majority of the effect was due to changes in the composition of teachers in the district, although there is evidence of modest incentive effects for young untenured teachers.

The Effect of Labor Market Regulations on Educational Attainment

This paper develops a theoretical and an empirical model to study the effect of higher employment protection on investments in tertiary education. The mechanism driving this link is the effect of employment protection on worker flows. Worker flows (which are synonymous with job flows in my model), are significantly lower with firing taxes, leading to fewer vacancies available per unemployed worker (also referred to as market tightness). This reduces the probability of finding a job and therefore lowers the expected return to education. In equilibrium, with high firing taxes, only the highest ability individuals invest in costly education. I test my model using panel data for more than a 100 countries over the period 1970-2005. Using data from the World Bank as well as from the Barro-Lee dataset on education, I find that, controlling for other factors, more flexible labor markets (or those with lower employment protection) are associated with relatively higher tertiary enrollment and graduation rates than more rigid markets.

Self-employment, educational attainment and employment protection legislation

We analyse how educational attainment and employment protection influence an individual's decision to become self-employed. By altering expected income from dependent employment, employment protection is likely to affect an individual's choice of occupation, although such a link has not been established in the literature so far. We argue that an interaction between an individual's educational attainment and the institution of employment protection exists when it comes to the decision regarding whether to become self-employed. Based on survey data from OECD countries, we find evidence for a negative interaction, and conclude that only after taking this interaction into account can the effect of employment protection and educational attainment on self-employment rates be assessed.

Self-Employment, Educational Attainment and Employment Protection Legislation

We analyse how educational attainment and employment protection influence an individual’s decision to become self-employed. By altering expected income from dependent employment, employment protection is likely to affect an individual’s choice of occupation, although such a link has not been established in the literature so far. We argue that an interaction between an individual’s educational attainment and the institution of employment protection exists when it comes to the decision regarding whether to become self-employed. Based on survey data from OECD countries, we find evidence for such a negative interaction, and find that only after taking this interaction into account can the effect of employment protection on self-employment rates be assessed.

The effect of employment protection and product market regulation on labour market performance: substitution or complementarity?

This article provides new evidence on the linkages between various forms of market regulation and joblessness and its components, unemployment and inactivity. One crucial contribution of this article is the analysis of the interdependence across Product Market Regulation (PMR) and labour markets regulation (Employment Protection Legislation (EPL)). With the help of a dynamic fixed effect model with an interaction term, we estimate the marginal impact of EPL and PMR at different levels of the other interacted variable. To cope with problems related to the inclusion of time-invariant institutional variables in fixed effect models, we present results of regressions based on a new procedure, specifically designed to treat slowly changing variables. We build time-series data to account for the annual evolution of EPL, and use new data for unemployment insurance net replacement rates. Among other results, we find evidence of a positive (negative) effect of EPL (PMR) on employment performance as well as of substitution, rather than complementarity, between the two forms of regulation.

The Effect of Employment Protection on Worker Effort: Absenteeism during and after Probation

Employment protection systems are widely believed to generate distortions in firms' hiring and firing decisions. However, much less is known about the impact of these regulations on workers' behavior. In this paper we provide evidence on the latter question using data from a large Italian bank. Our analysis is based on weekly observations for 545 men and 313 females hired as white-collar workers between January 1993 and February 1995. These workers begin to be protected against firing only after the 12th week of tenure, and we observe them for one year. We show that—particularly for men—the number of days of absence per week increases significantly once employment protection is granted at the end of probation. This suggests that the provision of employment protection causes the increase in absenteeism. Alternative explanations based on career concerns or on learning about social norms would predict a smooth relationship between absenteeism and tenure instead of the observed discrete jump. This consequence of employment protection seems to have been neglected in European policy debates so far.

The Effect of Employment Protection on Worker Effort: A Comparison of Absenteeism During and After Probation

Employment protection systems are known to generate significant distortions in firms' hiring and firing decisions. We know much less about the impact of these regulations on workers behaviour. The goal of this Paper is to fill in this gap and in particular to assess whether the provision of employment protection induces more absenteeism among workers. Our analysis is based on weekly observations for the 858 white-collar workers hired by a large Italian bank between January 1993 and February 1995. These workers begin to be protected against firing only after the twelfth week of tenure and we observe them for one year. We show that the number of day's absence per week more than doubles once employment protection is granted. This result offers a preliminary but robust piece of evidence to evaluate a consequence of employment protection systems that has been relatively neglected in the policy debate in Europe.