Do Employment Protections Reduce Productivity? Evidence from U.S. States

David H. Autor, William R. Kerr, Adriana D. Kugler

NBER Working Paper No. 12860
Issued in January 2007

---- Acknowledgements -----

E-mails: dautor@mit.edu, wkerr@hbs.edu and adkugler@uh.edu. The research in this paper was conducted while the authors were Special Sworn Status researchers of the U.S. Census Bureau at the Boston Census Research Data Center (BRDC). Support for this research from NSF grant (ITR-0427889) is gratefully acknowledged. Research results and conclusions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Census Bureau. This paper has been screened to insure that no confidential data are revealed. We are grateful to seminar participants at the IZA Conference on Employment Protection and Labor Markets, the Census Bureau RDC Conference, MIT, NBER Labor and Productivity Groups, SOLE, and AEA and, especially, to Daron Acemoglu, Josh Angrist, Giuseppe Bertola, Bjorn Brugemann, and Paul Oyer for their comments. Autor acknowledges generous support from the National Science Foundation (CAREER SES-0239538) and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Kugler acknowledges support from a GEAR grant from the University of Houston. The views expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

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