Labour Market Institutions Database¤
Stephen Nickelly and Luca Nunziataz
March 29, 2001

1

Introduction

This dataset contains information about the evolution of labour market institutions in twenty OECD countries from 1960 to 1992.
The countries in the sample are:
Australia
Austria
Belgium
Canada
Denmark

2
2.1

Finland
France
Germany
Ireland
Italy

Japan
Netherlands
Norway
New Zealand
Portugal

Spain
Sweden
Switzerland
United Kingdom
United States

The Data: De…nitions and Sources
Labour Market Institutions

EP: Employment Protection
Blanchard and Wolfers (2000) provide an employment protection time varying variable from 1960 to 1995, each observation taken every 5 years. This series was built chaining OECD data with data from Lazear (1990). Notice that the
OECD data, used from 1985 onward, is constructed on the basis of a more extensive collection of employment protection dimensions, compared with data used by Lazear. This dataset includes an interpolation of the Blanchard and
Wolfers series, readjusted in mean. Range is {0,2} increasing with strictness of employment protection.
¤ LMIDB: Version 1.00, 1960-1992. Thanks to Giuseppe Nicoletti and OECD, Olivier Blanchard, Justin Wolfers, Michele Belot, Jan Van Ours and Andrew Oswald for kindly providing some of the original series. y Centre for Economic Performance, LSE z Nu¢eld College, Oxford

1

UDNET: Net Union Density
This variable is constructed as the ratio of Total Reported Union Members
(gross minus retired and unemployed members), from Visser (1996), on Wage and Salaried Employees, from Comparative Welfare Dataset (1997). A few remarks have to be added:
1. From 1991 onward, wage and salary earners data refers to uni…ed Germany, yielding a downward biased ratio. To avoid the problem, the density data was chained with data provided by OECD and Bain and Price
(1980);
2. New Zealand data on salary and wage earners is not available for 1962-1978 and 1982-1985 periods, so Net Union Density was calculated using Total
Civilian Employment as denominator from the same dataset. Besides an interpolation was used for missing New Zealand data in 1987-1988.
3. The Visser data do not include any information for Portugal and Spain.
An interpolation of OECD values was used for these countries.
CO: Bargaining Coordination
This is an index with range f1; 3g constructed as an interpolation of OECD data on bargaining coordination. It is increasing in the degree of coordination in the bargaining process on the employers’ as well as on the unions’ side. The resulting series were matched with the data provided by Belot and Van Ours
(2000).
COW: Bargaining Coordination
Nickell et al (2001) provide a coordination series constructed using similar criteria as above, but containing short term variation in coordination.
COIT1-COIT6: Coordination Types
Dummy variables accounting for types of coordination from Nickell et at
(2001).
Adopting Traxler taxonomy we have:
COIT1=inter associational coordination;
COIT2=intra associational coordination;
COIT3=pattern setting;
COIT4=state imposed coordination;
COIT5=uncoordinated;
COIT6=state sponsored coordination.

2

BRR: Bene…t Replacement Rates
Bene…t Replacement Rates data is provided by OECD with one observation every two years for each country in the sample. The data refers to …rst year of unemployment bene…ts, averaged over family types of recipients, since in many countries bene…ts are distributed according to family composition.
BD: Bene…t Durations
An index was constructed by the authors as a weighted average equal to:
BD = ® B RR2 + (1 ¡ ®) B RR4
B RR1
B RR1 where: BRR1 is the unemployment bene…t replacement rate perceived during the …rst year of unemployment, BRR2 is the replacement rate perceived during the second and third year of unemployment and BRR4 is the replacement rate perceived during the fourth and …fth year of unemployment. Note