Using the Mirrlees optimal income tax model with a maxi-min social welfare function, we derive conditions for a decreasing marginal tax rate throughout the skill distribution, a strictly concave tax function in income and a single-peaked average tax schedule. With additive preferences and a...

Should income transfers be conditional upon personal characteristics of the potential recipients (the so-called “tagging”) or should they only be tied to reported incomes ? This question is addressed in a partial equilibrium setting distinguishing two types of jobs and a distribution of...

We here consider how Chinese firms adjust to higher minimum wages and how these affect aggregate productivity, exploiting the 2004 minimum-wage reform in China. We find that higher city-level minimum wages reduced the survival probability of firms which were the most exposed to the reform. For...

This paper uses Belgian firm-level data, covering the 1998-2006 period, to assess the impact on TFP growth of key labour force structural changes: ageing, feminisation and rise of educational attainment. Based on a Hellerstein-Neumark analytical framework, our work shows that an ageing workforce...

This paper investigates the problem of an "optimum population" concerning age structures in a 3-period OLG-model with endogenous fertility and longevity. The first-best solution for a number-dampened total social welfare function, including Millian and Benthamite utilitarianism as two extreme...

This paper shows that differences in fertility across European countries mainly emerge in the transition from the first to the second child and that childcare services enabling women to work are an important determinant for this transition to occur. The theoretical framework proposed accounts...

In several OECD countries age-targeted wage subsidies have been introduced to increase the employment of older workers, but evidence on their effectiveness is scarce. This paper examines the effects of a permanent wage cost subsidy in Belgium on the employment rate, working time and hourly wage....

We study the impact of graduating in a recession in Flanders (Belgium), i.e. in a rigid labor market. In the presence of a high minimum wage, a typical recession hardly influences the hourly wage of low educated men, but reduces working time and earnings by about 4.5% up to twelve years after...

Beyond natural sterility, there are two main types of childlessness: one driven by poverty and another by the high opportunity cost to child-rearing. We argue that taking childlessness and its causes into account matters for assessing the impact of development policies on fertility. We measure...

Agents can learn from financial markets to predict macroeconomic outcomes and learning dynamics can feed back into both the macroeconomy and financial markets. This paper builds on the adaptive learning (AL) model of Slobodyan andWouters (2012b) by introducing the term structure of interest...