Labour Market Counter-Reforms in OECD Countries: Conditional Impact on Output and Employment Growth

This paper empirically examines the impact of labour market counter-reforms on real GDP per capita and employment growth in 25 OECD countries between 1973 and 2012. We use a novel, narrative-based dataset of reform indicators and apply the local projections approach. We consider not only aggregated labour market counter-reforms but also distinguish between employment protection legislation (EPL), which we further split into counter-reforms for regular and temporary workers, and unemployment benefits (UB) counter-reforms. The effects of counter-reforms depend on the prevailing economic conditions and are not uniform across different types of counter-reforms.