John van Reenen
speaker
54 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2012
last heard May 2013
John van Reenen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Have there been any other studies done?
One of the criticisms that you can make of these macroeconomic studies is that there's so many things happening between different countries, you can never really control properly for them.
So one way to try and dig down into that, if you look at the hundreds of thousands of firms and economies, do they react to employment protection legislation?
And there you start to see some effects.
So, for example, in Italy...
When firms get to be 15 employees large, there's a very big increase of employment protection legislation.
And in France, there's something similar when firms get to be 50 or more employees.
I have a study which looks at France, which then looks at what firms do in response to that.
And of course, just as you'd expect, a lot of firms stay at around 48 or 49 employees large.
to avoid paying the extra cost of crossing that threshold of 50 employees.
But those effects are pretty small.
So when you start adding those all up to see how much that really matters in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't come to a very big effect.
Well, it's kind of profoundly depressing, really, because for an issue which is very important, how we can get more growth out of the economy...
then it really is important, I think, for politicians on all sides to try and look as best we can at the evidence, and especially with an issue like this, where there is substantial evidence that could be drawn on.
Showing 41–54 of 54 · page 3 of 3
← Previous