This paper presents a selective survey of the recent literature on labour market institutions and offers new empirical EU-based evidence on the impact of labour market reforms on employment and labour market adjustment. While the literature traditionally treats labour market institutions as exogenous, attention shifted recently towards understanding the underlying causes of specific institutional arrangements. As a consequence, the literature highlights the great importance of an efficient policy design exploiting these interactions wisely and identifies general principles for achieving an efficient policy design at both macro and micro levels. While empirical evidence does no show a major change in terms of intensity of labour market reform after the setting of the Economic and Monetary Union and the creation of the euro, the reforms aiming at strengthening the labour market attachment of vulnerable groups tend to have been successful both in raising their employment and increasing labour market adjustment. AbstractThis paper presents a selective survey of the recent literature on labour market institutions and offers new empirical EU-based evidence on the impact of labour market reforms on employment and labour market adjustment. While the literature traditionally treats labour market institutions as exogenous, attention shifted recently towards understanding the underlying causes of specific institutional arrangements. As a consequence, the literature highlights the great importance of an efficient policy design exploiting these interactions wisely and identifies general principles for achieving an efficient policy design at both macro and micro levels. While empirical evidence does no show a major change in terms of intensity of labour market reform after the setting of the Economic and Monetary Union and the creation of the euro, the reforms aiming at strengthening the labour market attachment of vulnerable groups tend to have been successful both in raising their employment and increasing labour market adjustment.Keywords: labour market functioning; political economy; endogeneity; institutions; policy design JEL classification: J20, J50, J64, K31.1 The opinions expressed in this paper are those of the authors only and do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Commission, DG-ECFIN or ULB. We would like to thank Khalid Sekkat (ULB), Eric Strobl (École Polytechnique, Paris), André Sapir (ULB), Frank Walsh (University College Dublin), François Rycx (ULB), Pierre-Guillaume Méon (ULB), Giuseppe Carone and Declan Costello for their helpful comments and discussions. All the errors and omissions are our own. Contact: gilles.mourre@ec.europa.eu.2 3 INTRODUCTIONThe variation of labour market responses to common shocks across industrialised countries in the late 1970 and early 1980s has been widely documented. While in some countries those shocks led to only a temporary deterioration in their unemployment prospects, others saw high and persistent unemployment even when the shocks faded away. This different...
Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may AbstractThis paper assesses the role of labour mobility in the adjustment to asymmetric economic shocks in the EU. After presenting a series of stylised facts of mobility in the EU, it assesses mobility as a channel of economic adjustment by means of a vector autoregression (VAR) analysis in the vein of Blanchard and Katz (BPEA 1:1-75, 1992). Results indicate that, over the period 1970-2013, mobility absorbed about a quarter of an asymmetric shock within 1 year. Movements in response to shocks have almost doubled since the introduction of the euro. In contrast to previous papers on the labour market adjustment in the EU, the response of wages is integrated to the analysis. It is found that real wages have also become more responsive to asymmetric shocks.JEL Classification: J61, J64
This paper analyses both the long and the short-run relation between government expenditure and potential output in EU countries by means of pooled mean group estimation (Pesaran, Shin, and Smith (1999)). Results show that, over a sample comprising EU-15 countries over the 1970-2003 period, it cannot be rejected the hypothesis of a common long-term elasticity between cyclically-adjusted primary expenditure and potential output close to unity. However, the long-run elasticity decreased considerably over the decades and is significantly higher than unity in catching-up countries, in fast-ageing countries, in low-debt countries, and in countries with weak numerical rules for the control of government spending. The average speed of adjustment of government expenditure to its long-tem relation is 3 years, but there are significant differences across countries. Anglo-Saxon and Nordic countries exhibit in general a faster adjustment process, while adjustment in Southern European countries appears somehow slower. JEL Classification: E62, H50, C23
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