How important is firm behaviour to understand employment?: evidence from Spain

Traditional macroeconomic analyses of the Spanish labor market have not beeen successful in accounting for Spain's high unemployment rates. In this paper, we take a micriecono,ic perspective,studying the entry and exit behaviorof Spanish firms and hence,their behavior concering job creation and job destruction. We calibrate a model economy with entry and exit to Spanish data and we find that the reduction of the dismissal tax from the equivalent of one year of wages to zero increase employment by 8.13 per cent, and productivity by 2.28 per cent.