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We analyse the effects of unemployment insurance and employment protection legislation on workers’ perception of job security. The French sample of the European Community Household Panel provides an indicator of workers’ perceived job security and enables us to simulate the potential unemployment insurance benefits an employee would receive in case of job loss. Exploiting a data set of unfair dismissal cases brought to labour courts, we compute the workers’ mean victory rate and the mean time before a case is heard across all French départements. We find that an increase in maximum compensation duration has a strong positive impact on perceived job security. A higher worker victory rate and speedier labour court processing are found to significantly improve perceived job security.