Employment protection legislation (EPL) is an important labour market policy whose strictness differs greatly across OECD countries. The collection of articles in this Feature provides new theoretical and empirical results which highlight the impact of EPL on productivity, job and firm turnover, (un)employment and the incidence of temporary contracts. Importantly, the effect of EPL is shown to differ across types of workers and firms. This yields new insights on the incentives for labour market reform. Copyright 2007 The Author(s). Journal compilation Royal Economic Society 2007.