\Western Europe su®ers from too many labor market rigidities, from excessively generous unemployment insurance to high employment protection, and to high minimum wages. It is essential that countries putting in place new institutions do not commit the same mistakes." The quote is made up. But it is, I believe, a fair representation of the opinions of many experts and many organizations, from Th...

and the conference participants for valuable comments and suggestions on an earlier version of this paper. We are responsible for all remaining errors.

The German Labor Market: Still Adjusting Badly? In the late nineties, Germany was often seen as a laggard with respect to labor market and welfare state reforms with institutional inertia being reflected in notoriously sluggish employment growth and rising unemployment. Recent years, however, saw a complex sequence of reforms with regard to labor market-related institutions such as labor market...

Market Imperfections and Firm-Sponsored Training Recent human capital theories predict that labor market frictions and product market competition influence firm-sponsored training. Using matched worker-firm data from Dutch manufacturing, our paper empirically assesses the validity of these predictions. We find that a decrease in labor market frictions significantly reduces firms’ training expen...

Labour market reforms face very often opposition from the employed workers, because it normally reduces their wages. Also product market regulations are regularly biased towards too much benefitting the firms. As a result there remain many frictions in both the labour and product markets that hinder an optimal functioning of the economy. These issues have recently received a lot of attention in...

I study the interactions of product and labor market institutions in a model characterized by a three-states representation of the labor market. Firms bargain with unions over wages and employment levels. This generates unemployment. Households take the associated unemployment risk as given in making their participation decisions. Unemployment inserts a wedge between labor supply (participation...

What Do Labor Market Institutions Do? The past couple of decades have seen a huge increase in research on various labor market institutions. This paper offers a brief overview and discussion of research on the labor market impacts of minimum wages (MW), unemployment insurance (UI), and employment protection legislation (EPL). It is argued that research on UI is largely a success story, involvin...

To reduce the labor cost and the workload required in the tobacco curing process, an intelligent tobacco curing control technique adopting color identification of the tobacco leaves is proposed. The HSI color space is used in color segmentation and the color recognition with fuzzy decision is used in the curing process. The curing controller can identify the curing stage by the color features o...

In an equilibrium model of the labor market, workers and firms enter into dynamic contracts that can potentially last forever, but are subject to optimal terminations. Upon termination, the firm hires a new worker, and the worker who is terminated receives a termination contract from the firm and is then free to go back to the labor market to seek new employment opportunities and enter into new...

The Role of Borders, Languages, and Currencies as Obstacles to Labor Market Integration* Based on a modified Spatiotemporal Autoregressive Model (STAR), we analyze whether borders still constitute significant impediments to labor market integration in the European Union, despite the formal law of free movement of labor. Using regional data from the EU-15 countries over 21 years, we find that th...