Title: Great expectations
Description: "This paper reviews the literature on employment and labor law.  It is observed that all jurisdictions in the world have extensive employment and labor law, even though many economists recommend a reduction in legal restrictions.  The review of the law illustrates that it has evolved in response to problems of market and contract incompleteness, that often leads to inefficient allocations ex post.  In contrast, due to data limitations, the economic analysis of legal rules tends to focus upon ex post inefficiencies.  The review concludes that in order to understand the structure of current legal rules, and the appropriate way to modify them there needs to be more empirical research that explicitly incorporates transactions costs"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site.