The Cost of Job Security Regulation: Evidence from Latin American Labor Markets

By James Heckman, Carmen Pagés-Serra. 2000

502 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper documents the high level of job security protection in Latin American labor markets and analyzes its impacts on employment. The authors show that job security policies have a substantial impact on the level and the distribution of employment in Latin America. These policies reduce employment and promote inequality. The institutional organization of the labor market affects both employment and inequality.

Subfields: Demography, Economics and Econometrics, Public Administration

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5bbb5024e9a22ad06ce387d29423d69d4f0f3983

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Citations in the corpus

The Impact of Minimum Wages on Wages, Work and Poverty in Nicaragua (2011, unknown): “…an era when global competition is very strong, some policy makers argue for reductions in (and even the abolition of) minimum wages and other labor market regulation in developing countries to allow for more labor market flexibility and increased competitiveness (see e.g., Heckman and Pages, 2000).”
Labour Market Regulations and the Sectoral Reallocation of Workers: The Case of Trade Reforms (2009, methodology): “Second, I document that the sectoral reallocation of labor after a trade reform is much faster in the absence of labor market regulations.”
Jobs for Shared Prosperity: Time for Action in the Middle East and North Africa (2013, background): “For example, Heckman and Pages (2000) show that in Latin America, more stringent job security laws are associated with lower employment and higher unemployment, particularly among young workers.”
Trade, Inequality, and Poverty: What Do We Know? (2004, unknown): “Unfortunately, the evidence on unionization rates and union bargaining power is mostly anecdotal, because information on union membership is not available at the individual level (or even the industrylevel) for Colombia, and it is available only in some years and data sets for Brazil.”
The Importance of Employment Protection for Skill Development in Coordinated Market Economies (2007, background): “Jacoby (2005) notes contradictory pressures, even in the USA: inequality and light regulation are seen as the price of liberty and innovation, and yet freedom is also associated with community and commitment.”
Trade Liberalization and Industry Wage Structure : Evidence from Brazil (2004, unknown): “…in Latin America where markets are often characterized by labor market restrictions that potentially obstruct labor mobility across sectors (Heckman and Pages (2000)), and where domestic industries are often shielded from foreign competition so that market power and industry rents are…”
Gross Job Flows and Institutions in Europe (2004, unknown): “Thus, as Heckman and Pages (2000) point out, the reduced timeseries variation in the institutional data may result in imprecise estimates (high standard errors) when country-specific fixed effects are included in the regressions.”