[No Abstract]

Unemployment in Austria has been considerably low in the past decades compared to other European countries. Nevertheless, recent increases in the past five years started a controversial discussion about the generous unemployment insurance system in place. The current government, therefore, argues to change the insurance system similar to the German HARTZ IV reform, although the effects on unemployment have proven to be ambiguous in Germany. I introduce a discrete time life-cycle model with endogenous job-search effort to inquire the potential effects of such a reform on long- and short-term unemployment, as well as individuals' job-search incentives. Individuals are ex-ante heterogeneous in their labour income possibilities and are subject to exogenous layoffs throughout their life. The model suggests that the proposed reform would reduce long-term unemployment substantially, however, to the cost of a larger amount of short-term unemployment spells and decreased overall welfare. Job-search effort over the whole life-cycle appears to increase, with the largest differences at the end of the life-cycle.

The economic crisis faced by Spain, forced the Spanish government to conduct several reforms in labor legislation in order to address the high rates of unemployment, which led greater flexibility about worker protection, reflected more intensively about dismissal labor. Thus, this article will develop the most important edges of this new legal regime of dismissal according to Spanish labor regulations. / La crisis económica que afrontó España, obligo al Gobierno Español a realizar una serie de reformas en la legislación laboral a fin de afrontar las altas tasas de desempleo conllevando a la flexibilización de la protección del trabajador, la cual se manifestó con mayor intensidad en la institución jurídica del despido laboral. En razón a ello, es que el presente artículo desarrollará las aristas más importantes de este nuevo régimen jurídico del despido de acuerdo a la normativa laboral española.