How Important Are Labor Market Institutions for Labor Market Performance in Transition Countries? This paper offers a first comprehensive study of the relationship between labor market institutions and policies and labor market performance in the countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, which in the last two decades experienced radical economic and institutional transformations. Based on a...

Medicare hospital payments are adjusted to reflect variation in hospital wages across geographic areas by grouping hospitals into labor market areas. By only recognizing the average wage in an area, Medicare encourages hospitals to contain costs. Labor market area definitions have recently received renewed attention because of their impact on hospital payments. Alternative labor market areas we...

Labor Market Pooling, Outsourcing and Labor Contracts Economic regions, such as urban agglomerations, face external demand and price shocks that produce income risk. Workers in large and diversified agglomerations may benefit from reduced wage volatility, while firms may outsource the production of intermediate goods and realize benefits from Chamberlinian externalities. Firms may also protect ...

Abstract While the level of women’s participation in the labor market is on the rise in the world, the level of participation of Iranian women has not proportionately increased, and women constitute only a small portion of the active population in Iran. Among factors affecting women’s participation in the labor market are the decisions concerning retirement and the willingness to work by the m...

A distinguishing feature of labor services is that they are immediately perishable. This paper explores the implications of immediate perishability for the market for homogenous labor services that are sold in a centralized exchange. The analysis sheds light on the nature of unemployment. The paper also explores implications for the role of labor cartels and firms in providing workers an altern...

As China passes through its Lewis turning point characterized first by the appearance of a labor shortage and a constant increase in wages, its labor market shows both features of the dual economy and neoclassical growth. This paper first depicts the trend of population as a root cause of the labor market transition from dual economy to neoclassical scenario. It then reveals the changed labor m...

This paper estimates the macroeconomic effect of labor market programs on labor force participation. Labor market programs could counteract business-cycle variation in the participation rate that is due to the discouraged-worker effect, and they could prevent labor force outflow. An equation that determines the participation rate is estimated with GMM, using panel data (1986-1998) for Sweden’s ...

Trade and Labor Reallocation with Heterogeneous Enforcement of Labor Regulations This paper revisits the question of how trade openness affects labor market outcomes in a developing country setting. We explore the fact that plants face varying degrees of exposure to global markets and to the enforcement of labor market regulations, and rely on Brazil’s currency crisis in 1999 as an exogenous so...