Essays on employment protection and its impacts on workers well-being.

Summary This thesis explores the impacts of employment protection and labor market institutions on worker stress, hours worked, and consumption. The first part examines how labor market shocks affect household consumption. Consumption is modeled to compare the response of households to real data, to calculate the welfare losses associated with each shock and to simulate the impact of unemployment insurance reforms. The second part studies the impact of employment protection laws on the variability of working hours and overtime. In a theoretical model, a firm chooses the number of workers and the hours per worker. Hiring and firing costs and variation in product demand generate variations in hours worked. Using Canadian data, we find that the impact of job protection on overtime use is positive and significant for provinces with long layoff notices, but negligible when notices are short. Finally, the third component looks at the effects of job protection on workers' stress and well-being. Job protection should benefit permanent employees by reducing their risk of losing their jobs, but may also have adverse effects. We test whether job protection increases or decreases stress using seven OECD surveys and a Canadian health survey. Job protection has a positive and significant impact on job stress in sectors with high job destruction relative to other sectors.