Employment Protection: Tough to Scrap or Tough to Get?
探讨就业保护政策为何长期存在，提出一种新观点：就业保护难以建立而非难以废除，因为企业会在政策实施前调整就业，导致工人不支持该政策。
Differences in employment protection across countries appear to be quite persistent over time. One view of this persistence is that high employment protection creates a mass of workers in favor of maintaining high protection because deregulation would mean that they would lose their jobs. According to this view, employment protection is a policy that is difficult to deregulate. In this paper I will examine a different view of the aforementioned persistence, namely that employment protection is a policy which is difficult to introduce. If a country decides to adopt employment protection, it is reason-able to assume that firms have ample opportunity to adjust employment levels before protection actually comes into effect. In particular, firms would have an incentive to dis-miss some workers today in order to avoid problems with high employment protection in the future. Anticipating this, workers whose situation is already precarious may not find it in their best interest to support the proposal in the first place. The main result of the paper is that delayed implementation may give rise to situations in which both low and high employment protection are stable political outcomes.