Legal Origins and Labor Market Outcomes of Men and Women (Incomplete, comments welcome.) Josef

Virtually every available measure of labor regulation signals high propensity to regu-late labor markets in French law countries and low propensity to do so in common law countries. Scandinavian, German and Post-socialist countries mostly lie between the two extremes. The paper exploits variation in institutional environment and regula-tion of labor across legal origins to explain international differences in gender-gender income ratio, income inequality, labor force participation, unemployment, and selfem-ployment. Relative to common law countries, women have higher relative incomes in French (17%), Scandinavian (14%), and Post-socialist (16%) countries. In Scandina-vian and Post-socialist countries, female labor-force participation is about 15 % higher relative to common law countries, whereas in French law countries, women exibit lower participation and tend to be more often unemployed (3.5%) or selfemployed (4%). A plausible interpretation is that in strong (past) active labor market policies may be driving results in Scandinavian and Post-socialist countries, whereas labor regulation in French law countries burdens marginal workers.