---

The impact of social security expenditure on the labor market (wages and employment) has been regarded in economic researches. This paper evaluates the short-run and long-run effects of social security expenditure on wage and employment using Autoregressive Distributed Lags (ARDL) approach during 1979-2007. Our findings indicate that the insurance contribution deductions from the employees have negative impact on the real wage in both short-run and long-run and decrease their purchasing power. Moreover, employer's social security expenditure has a negative but insignificant effect on employment. In addition, labor productivity and economic growth are the main factors affecting the labor market.