This proposal involves the establishment of ‘welfare accounts’ for every person in a country. There are four accounts: a retirement account (covering pensions), an unemployment account (covering unemployment support), a human capital account (covering education and training), and a health...

We estimate a model of the joint participation and mobility along with the individuals' wage formation in France. Our model makes it possible to distinguish between unobserved person heterogeneity and state-dependence. We estimate the model using state of the art Bayesian methods employing a...

This Paper explores the influence of on-the-job training on the employment effect of firing costs. It shows that on-the-job training (generating firm specific skills) causes firing costs to have a contractionary influence on average employment (over the booms and recessions of the business cycle).

In this paper we estimate by matching techniques the effects of a French retraining program on the reemployment rate of laid-off workers. This program, called “Conventions de conversion”, was intended to improve reemployment prospects of displaced workers by proposing them retraining and job...

The paper examines the employment and unemployment implications of permitting unemployed people to use part of their unemployment benefits to provide employment vouchers to the firms that hire them. This opportunity to transfer unemployment benefits, `benefit transfers', would help replace the...

This paper explores the optimal design of subsidies for hiring unemployed workers (‘employment vouchers’ for short) in the context of a simple macroeconomic model of the labour market. Focusing on the short-term and long-term effects of the vouchers on employment and unemployment, the...

The paper explores the employment implications of allowing people the opportunity of using a portion of their incapacity benefits to provide employment vouchers for employers that hire them. The analysis indicates that introducing this policy could increase employment, raise the incomes of...

The paper analyses the contemporary organizational restructuring of production and work and derives some salient implications for the labour market. The analysis focuses on the switch from occupational specialization at 'Tayloristic' organizations to multi-tasking at 'holistic' organizations....

Macroeconomic shocks and labour-market institutions jointly determine employment growth and economic performance. The effect of shocks depends on the nature of these institutions and the effect of institutional change depends on the macroeconomic environment. It follows that a given set of...

This paper investigates the effect of employment while in college on graduation, using data from the French Labour Force Surveys over the period 1992 to 2002. Using spatial variation in low-skill youth unemployment rates to circumvent the endogeneity of college employment decisions, we find a...