Whether EPL has any effect on unemployment is an issue of contention between economists. On the one hand, assuming that the cyclical wage pattern is not affected by mandated firing costs, EPL reduces the propensity to hire by employers, since they fear that such decisions will be difficult to reverse in the future, in case of a recession. On the other hand, EPL also leads firms during downswings to keep more workers employed, than they would have otherwise done. Therefore, EPL reduces both job creation and job destruction, so that the net effects on average employment and unemployment are not identifiable a priori. What is instead agreed among economists, is that more stringent EPL lowers the fluctuations in the quantity of labour demanded over the business cycle, leading to smoother dynamic patterns of those aggregates. Economists considering that EPL has no effect on unemployment include Blanchard and Portugal (2000). In their article they compare two opposite countries as regards their EPL stance: Portugal with one of the more strict legislations in the world and the US with one of the more flexible ones. In spite of these differences, both countries have similar unemployment rates which undermines the argument considering that EPL has any effect on unemployment. Instead, the authors claim that EPL does affect two other variables: job flows and unemployment duration. EPL would reduce job flows (from employment to unemployment: employers are less willing to fire, given that they must pay indemnizations to workers) therefore reducing unemployment but would increase unemployment duration, increasing the unemployment rate. These two effects would neutralize each other, explaining why overall, EPL has no effect on unemployment. Nickell (1997) arrived to similar conclusions when stating that labor market rigidities that do not appear to have serious implications for average levels of unemployment included strict employment protection legislation and general legislation on labor market standards. Among those that have found evidence suggesting that EPL increases unemployment are Lazear (1990). The author argued that mandated severance pay seemed to increase unemployment rates. His estimates suggested that an increase from zero to three months of severance pay would raise the unemployment rate by 5.5 percent in the United States. On employment Lazear (1990) once again argues he has evidence suggesting that EPL reduces the employment-to-population ratio. In his article he claims that the best estimates suggest that moving from no required severance pay to three months of