Employment protection legislation and SME performance

Abstract

This article examines the effect of employment protection legislation (EPL) on small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) performance. Rather than relying on country-specific proxies for EPL, as is common in the literature, we compute firm-specific measures of a firm’s exposure to EPL by using a panel dataset of 13,112 Belgian SMEs for the period between 2000 and 2009. The empirical results show that firms perform better when faced with lower hiring and firing costs through the use of more blue-collar labour contracts. The evidence showing improved performance by firms that attempt to achieve greater flexibility by hiring more temporary workers is limited.