Mapping Employment Dismissal Law: A Leximetric Investigation of EPL Stringency and Regulatory Style

This paper exploits a newly available dataset from the ILO—the EPLex—that includes unusually rich data about laws regulating individual dismissal in a broad cross-section of nations. These data differ from commonly used leximetric datasets by including comparatively more countries, especially including a considerable sample of developing nations. Although the EPLex dataset has been developed to measure EPL stringency over five years (2009 – 2013), it provides principally a single, cross-sectional observation for 95 countries in the year 2010, along with 13 instances of legal change within the 5-year panel and 11 countries with distinct legal rules for different classes of workers. As additional data for other aspects of EPL and for additional years are released, we plan to update our analyses accordingly.