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Many biases plague the analysis of whether employers share rents with their employees, unlike what is predicted by the competitive labour market model. Using a Portuguese matched employer-employee panel, this article is one of the first to address these biases in three complementary ways: (1) Controlling directly for the fact that firms that share more rents will, ceteris paribus, have lower net-of-wages profits. (2) Instrumenting profits via interactions between the exchange rate and the share of exports in firm's total sales. (3) Considering firm or firm/worker spell fixed effects and highlighting the role of downward wage rigidity. These approaches clarify conflicting findings in the literature and result, in our preferred specifications, in significant evidence of rent sharing (a Lester range of pay dispersion of 56%), also shown to be robust to a number of competitive interpretations.

This article presents evidence about the effects of dismissals-for-cause requirements, a specific component of employment protection legislation that has received little attention. I study a quasi-experiment generated by a law introduced in Portugal: out of the 12 paragraphs in the law that dictated the costly procedure required for dismissals for cause, eight did not apply to small firms. Using matched employer-employee longitudinal data and difference-in-differences methods, I examine the impact of that differentiated change in firing costs upon several variables. The results do not indicate robust effects on job or worker flows, although some estimates suggest an increase in hirings. However, firms that gain flexibility in their dismissals exhibit sizable increases in their relative performance. This finding suggests that reducing firing costs of the type studied here increases workers' effort. (c) 2009 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved..

This paper reviews the existing literature on the tests used to determine the mechanical properties of women breast tissues (fat, glandular and tumour tissue) as well as the different values of these properties. The knowledge of the mechanical properties of breast tissue is important for cancer detection, study and planning of surgical procedures such as surgical breast reconstruction using pre-surgical methods and improving the interpretation of clinical tests. Based on the data collected from the analysed studies, some important conclusions were achieved: (1) the Young's modulus of breast tissues is highly dependent on the tissue preload compression level, and (2) the results of these studies clearly indicate a wide variation in moduli not only among different types of tissue but also within each type of tissue. These differences were most evident in normal fat and fibroglandular tissues.

We conduct a meta-analysis of more than 30 papers that study the causal relationship between exporting and firm productivity. Our main result, robust to different specifications and to different weights for each observation, indicates that the impact of exporting upon productivity is higher for developing than developed economies. We also find that the export effect tends to be higher (1) in the first year that firms start exporting (compared to later years); and (2) when the sample used in the paper is not restricted to matched firms. Moreover, we find no evidence of publication bias

Rigidity in real hiring wages plays a crucial role in some recent macroeconomic models. But are hiring wages really so noncyclical? We propose using employer/employee longitudinal data to track the cyclical variation in the wages paid to workers newly hired into specific entry jobs. Illustrating the methodology with 1982–2008 data from the Portuguese census of employers, we find real entry wages were about 1.8 percent higher when the unemployment rate was 1 percentage point lower. Like most recent evidence on other aspects of wage cyclicality, our results suggest that the cyclical elasticity of wages is similar to that of employment. (JEL E24, E32, J31, J64)

Several countries extend collective bargaining agreements to entire sectors, therefore binding non-subscriber workers and employers. These extensions may address coordination issues but may also distort competition by imposing sector-specific minimum wages and other work conditions that are not appropriate for many firms. In this paper, we analyse the impact of such extensions along several margins drawing on firm-level monthly data for Portugal, a country where extensions have been widespread until recently. Drawing on the scattered timing of the extensions, we find that both formal employment and wage bills in the relevant sector fall, on average, by 2% -and by 25% more across small firms -over the four months after an extension is issued. These results are driven by both reduced hirings and increased firm closures. On the other hand, informal work, not subject to labour law or extensions, tends to increase. Our findings are robust to several checks, including a falsification exercise based on extensions that were announced but not implemented.