Since July 2004 the job search effort of long-term unemployed benefit claimants is monitored in Belgium. We exploit the discontinuity in the treatment assignment at the age of 30 to evaluate the effect of a notification sent at least 8 months before job search is verified. The threat of...

This paper develops a partial equilibrium job search model to study the behavioral and welfare implications of an Unemployment Insurance (UI) scheme in which job search requirements are imposed on UI recipients with hyperbolic preferences. We show that, if the search requirements are well...

The current unemployment insurance and employment protection legislation were set up in an environment in which relationships between workers and firms were typically long-lasting and stable. The increasing globalisation of the economy and the rapid technological and organisational changes...

Since the middle of the 1980s many European countries have reduced the strictness of their employment protection mainly by relaxing it for temporary jobs. These countries are Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and Sweden. The article explores the...

Liste di mobilità (LM) is an Italian labour market programme targeted to dismissed workers. There is a ‘passive’ component granting monetary benefits to employees dismissed by firms larger than 15 employees, and an ‘active’ component providing an employment subsidy to any firm hiring...

Reforms of employment protection (EPL) in Europe eased the recourse to temporary forms of employment while not reducing the strictness of EPL of permanent jobs (with the exception of Spain). Since 1990, such two-tier reforms have been implemented in Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Italy, the...

Unemployment insurance (UI) sanctions in the form of benefit reductions are intended to set disincentives for UI recipients to stay unemployed. Empirical evidence about the effects of UI sanctions in Germany is sparse. Using administrative data we investigate the effects of sanctions on the...

Does the supply of a welfare state create its own demand? Many economic scholars studying welfare arrangements refer to Say’s law and insinuate a self-destructive welfare state. However, little is known about the empirical validity of these assumptions and hypotheses. We study the dynamic...