Legal Origins, Labor Regulations, and Labor Market Outcomes

Pauline Fady Estephane and Jamal Haidar ()

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Using data from 50 economies, we re-examine the role of legal origins in shaping labor regulations and explore the consequences of these regulations on labor market outcomes. We find that civil law countries tend to adopt more protective labor regulations while common law countries emphasize flexible employment regulations. We document that de jure protective labor regulations create barriers to labor market entry while de facto flexible employment regulations have adverse informal employment and labor productivity consequences. Our results suggest that flexible employment regulations without adequate labor protection laws can encourage labor exploitation, reduce labor productivity, and are insufficient to draw firms and workers into the formal sector.

Keywords: legal origins; labor regulations; labor market outcomes; informal economy; productivity; B-READY (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E24 E26 J41 J46 J52 J83 K1 K10 K3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-11-20
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in Labor History (2025): pp. 1-36

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/127377/1/MPRA_paper_127377.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:127377

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().