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    Capital Markets Integration and Labor Market Institutions

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    A major development in recent decades in industrialized countries is the decline in national savings rates. Over the same period, in many countries the labor's share of national income has declined and liberalizing labor market reforms have been implemented. This paper seeks to provide a unified account of these developments. We show that globalization, in the form of increased capital mobility, provides incentives to implement labor market reforms that raise the returns to capital and improve efficiency. Nevertheless, in a world where aggregate savings reflect life-cycle motives and are mainly performed out of labor income, the associated fall in the labor share reduces aggregate savings and the pace of capital accumulation

    Youth unemployment in Italy

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    Employment protection legislation and wages

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    In a perfect labor market severance payments can have no real effects as they can be undone by a properly designed labor contract (Lazear 1990). We give empirical content to this proposition by estimating the effects of EPL on entry wages and on the tenure-wage profile in a quasi-experimental setting. We consider a reform that introduced unjust-dismissal costs in Italy for firms below 15 employees, leaving firing costs unchanged for bigger firms. Estimates which account for the endogeneity of the treatment status due to workers and firms sorting around the 15 employees threshold show no effect of the reform on entry wages and a decrease of the returns to tenure by around 20% in the first year and by 8% over the first two years. We interpret these findings as broadly consistent with Lazear's (1990) prediction that firms make workers prepay the severance cost

    Finance and Employment

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    How does finance affect employment and inter-industry job reallocation? We present a model that predicts that financial development (i) increases employment and/or labour productivity and wages, with a smaller impact at high levels of the equilibrium wage and financial development; (ii) may induce either more or less reallocation of jobs depending on whether shocks to profit opportunities or to cash flow predominate; (iii) amplifies the output and employment losses in crises, firms that rely most on banks for liquidity being hit the hardest. Testing these predictions on international industry-level data for 1970–2003, we find that standard measures of financial development are indeed associated with greater employment growth, although only in non-OECD countries, and are not correlated with labour productivity or real wage growth. Moreover, they correlate negatively with inter-industry dispersion of employment growth. Finally, there is some evidence of a ‘dark side’ of financial development, in that during banking crises employment grows less in the industries that are more dependent on external finance and those located in the more financially developed countries
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