The analysis presented in this paper defines three different synthetic measurements ofdisincentives for formal work: two standard measurements, namely the tax wedge and themarginal effective tax rate (METR); and a new, innovative measurement called formalizationtax rate (FTR). The novelty of the...

Worker-level panel data are used to analyse the separate employment effects of increases in the social security taxes paid by employers and increases in the minimum wage in Turkey between 2002 and 2005. Variation over time and among low-wage workers in the ratio of total labour costs to the...

This paper studies the effects on registered employment, earnings, and number of registered establishments of two employment subsidy schemes in Turkey. We implement a difference-in-differences methodology to construct appropriate counterfactuals for the covered provinces...

In view of rising wage inequality and increasing poverty, the introduction of a legal minimum wage has recently become an important policy issue in Germany. We analyze the distributional effects of the introduction of a nationwide legal minimum wage of 7.5 per hour on the basis of a...

Using a matched firm-worker dataset, we show both theoretically and empirically that positiveassortative matching between firms...

On theoretical grounds, monitoring of top executives by the (supervisory) board is expectedto be value relevant. The empirical evidence is ambiguous and we analyze three noncompetingexplanations for this ambiguity: (i) The positive effect on firm value of boardmonitoring is hidden in stock price...

The Swedish labour market and social policy is aimed at facilitating flexibility in the labourmarket. The active labour market policy and the design of the social security pension systemare two frequently mentioned examples of that policy...

Between the years 1996 and 2003, a series of amendments were made to the Tax ReformAct of 1986 (TRA86) that gradually increased the tax credit for health insurance purchases bythe self-employed from 25 to 100 percent. We study how these changes in the tax code haveinfluenced the likelihood that...

To assess the employment effects of labor costs it is crucial to have reliable estimates of thelabor cost elasticity of labor demand. Using a matched firm-worker dataset, we estimate along run unconditional labor demand function, exploiting information on workers to correct forendogeneity in the...

We study the impact of tax and minimum wage reforms on the incidence of informality. Togauge the incidence of informality, we use measures of the extent of tax evasion, the extentof minimum wage non-compliance, and the size of the informal workforce. Our approachallows us to examine (i) the...