We document the presence of a trade-off between unemployment benefits (UB) and employment protection legislation (EPL) in the provision of insurance against labour market risk. The mix of quantity restrictions and price regulations adopted by the various countries would seem to correspond to a...

Bismarckian social security systems are associated with larger public pension expenditures, a smaller fraction of private pension and lower income inequality than Beveridgean systems. This paper introduces a bidimensional voting model to account for all these features. Agents differ in age,...

This paper evaluates to what extent the introduction of firing costs can affect the aggregate dynamics of a neoclassical growth model with heterogeneous establishments. Similarly to the previous literature, firing costs are found to have large steady-state effects. However, they have no...

Barriers to trade lead to significant distortions in domestic prices and cause an inefficient allocation of resources across sectors. An expected outcome of a trade reform is a significant sectoral reallocation of labor in the economy. The amount and speed of the reallocation, however, will also...

This paper examines how policies affect people's welfare during business cycles when markets are incomplete. In particular, we analyze cyclical policies such as cyclical taxation and cyclical unemployment insurance. Those policies play two roles: smoothing the income (and consumption) process...

We derive the shape of optimal unemployment insurance contracts when agents can exert search effort but have private information about their search technology. We derive a recursive solution of our adverse selection problem with repeated moral hazard. Conditions under which the UI agency should...

This paper extends Mortensen and Pissarides (1994) by introducing workers' risk aversion. In doing so, it provides a framework within which to study jointly the optimal supply of job security and the allocational and welfare consequences of government intervention in excess of private...

We study the role of employment protection legislation (EPL) in determining firm size distribution. In many countries the provisions of EPL are more stringent for firms above certain size thresholds. We construct a simple model that shows that the smooth relation between size and growth...

In this paper we ask a question whether a prolonging of entitlement to unemployment benefits that happened in the mid 80s can explain the unusual increase in unemployment rates of unskilled and old workers. To answer this question we estimate a version of Burdett-Mortensen model of search...

Job search is an unpleasant activity with immediate costs and delayed benefits. The tension between long-run goals and short-run impulses may lead unemployed workers to postpone repeatedly tasks necessary to find a job. In standard economic models, agents are assumed to be time-consistent, so...