Publications
Publications
- July 2005
- European Economic Review
The Consequences of Labor Market Flexibility: Panel Evidence Based on Survey Data
By: Rafael Di Tella and Robert MacCulloch
Abstract
We introduce a new data set on hiring and firing restrictions for 21 OECD countries for the period 1984 –1990. The data are based on surveys of business people in the countries covered, so the indices we use are subjective in nature. Controlling for country and time fixed effects, and using dynamic panel data techniques, we find evidence that increasing the flexibility of the labor market increases both the employment rate and the rate of participation in the labor force. A conservative estimate suggests that if France were to make its labor markets as flexible as those in the US, its employment rate would increase 1.6 percentage points, or 14% of the employment gap between the two countries. The estimated effects are larger in the female than in the male labor market, although both groups seem to have similar long-run coeffcients. There is also some evidence that more flexibility leads to lower unemployment rates and to lower rates of long-term unemployment. We also find evidence consistent with the hypothesis that inflexible labor markets produce “jobless recoveries” and introduce more unemployment persistence.
Keywords
Job Security Provisions; Subjective Data; Unemployment; Employment; Labor; Markets; Data and Data Sets
Citation
Di Tella, Rafael, and Robert MacCulloch. "The Consequences of Labor Market Flexibility: Panel Evidence Based on Survey Data." European Economic Review 49, no. 5 (July 2005): 1225–59.