The period before the crisis was characterised by a big push for labour market deregulation around the world. This text, while posing some critical question in regards to excessive regulation, examines the beneficial effects of labour market institutions, when they are well designed. Organized...

Is job security important for workers when choosing a job? Using comparative data among 18 European countries, this paper investigates the influence of job security in the choice of employment. Our empirical analysis evidences significant cross-country differences in the importance attributed to...

A common finding of the optimal unemployment insurance literature is that the optimal UI replacement rate is around 50%, implying that current levels in the US are close to optimal. However, a key assumption in the existing literature is that unemployment benefits are the only government...

In this paper, we provide a dynamic model with heterogeneous agents to study child labor in an economy with idiosyncratic shocks to employment. Households facing adverse shocks may use child labor as a buffer to smooth consumption. We show that the introduction of an unemployment insurance...

This paper studies the optimal unemployment insurance for older workers in a repeated principal-agent model, where the search intensity of risk-averse workers (the agents) is not observed by the risk-neutral insurance agency (the principal). When unemployment benefits are the only available...

At the end of working life, as well as reducing unemployment benefits, the unemployment-insurance agency could apply pension tax instead of wage tax. First, the pension tax provides greater incentives as the value of re-employment is tax-free. Second, the short job duration before retirement...

This paper characterizes the optimal policy within a dynamic search model of the labor market with risk-averse workers. In a fi…rst-best allocation of resources, unemployment benefi…ts should provide perfect insurance against the unemployment risk, layoff taxes are necessary to induce...

This paper studies the optimal unemployment insurance for older workers in a repeated principal-agent model, where the search intensity of risk-averse workers (the agents) is not observed by the risk-neutral insurance agency (the principal). When unemployment benefits are the only available...

Degressivity of unemployment benefits is a major feature of social protection in most industrialised countries: the replacement rate (the ratio between the level of welfare benefits and the previous income) typically declines with the length of the unemployment spell. Moreover degressivity of...

This paper analyses the potential impacts of introducing unemployment insurance (UI) in middle income countries using the case of Malaysia, which today does not have such a system. The analysis is based on a job search model with unemployment and three employment sectors: formal and informal...