Minas Vlassis

Ethnic Discrimination in the Greek Labour Market: Occupational Access, Insurance Coverage, and Wage Offers

By means of a field experiment we investigate whether low-skilled male Albanians face discrimination in the Greek labour market. To test for discrimination in occupational access, curriculum vitae which differed only in ethnicity were faxed to firms. The probability for Albanians to receive an interview is lower than for Greeks by 21.4 percentage points. Furthermore, by exploiting the informal wage and insurance coverage offers on the part of employers, we find a wage discrimination factor of 11 per cent against the Albanians, while their probability of being registered with insurance is 25.7 percentage points lower than that for Greeks.

Employment-protecting Labour Market Institutions and Inward Foreign Direct Investments

This paper proposes labour market institutional arrangements as a strategic device to induce or deter export-substituting inward foreign direct investments (FDI) - in either instance protecting domestic employment. In a union-oligopoly context it is shown that, if the FDI-associated unit costs (FC) are not high enough, then employment-neutral (-enhancing) inward FDI will emerge in equilibrium if the domestic wage setting is credibly centralized and the unemployment benefit is sufficiently high (low), each instance arising for a different range of - intermediate - FC values. If however the FC values are sufficiently high, then the centralized structure of wage setting along with a low enough unemployment benefit will deter employment-reducing inward FDI. Copyright 2009 CEIS, Fondazione Giacomo Brodolini and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.