This paper argues that, for a given overall level of labour income taxation, a more progressive tax schedule reduces the unemployment rate and increases the employment rate. From a theoretical point of view, higher progressivity induces a wage-moderation effect and increases overall employment...

We develop a model of commodity tax competition with monopolistically competitive internationally mobile firms, transport costs, and asymmetric country sizes. We investigate the impacts of non-cooperative tax setting, as well as of tax harmonization and changes in the tax principle, in both the...

This paper investigates the effect of tax progression on labour market outcomes in an equilibrium search model with wage bargain and endogenous human capital. We show that this effect depends on whether the firm and the worker can write a binding contract on human capital investments or not. If...

A benevolent social planner which faces a cost of public funds because of distortive taxation, wants to finance an upstream monopoly. This monopoly produces a necessary input for a downstream competitive sector which competes à la Cournot (with either a fixed number of firms or free entry in...

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...

In recent years Western governments have introduced a number of emergency measures in their fight against short run unemployment. In this paper a normative analysis concerning the joint implementation of two such measures is offered, viewing unemployment as involuntary, and taking account of the...

We investigate how continental European unemployment can be reduced without reducing unemployment benefits and without reducing the net income of low-wage earners. Lower unemployment replacement rates reduce unemployment, the net wage and unemployment benefits. A lower tax on labour increases...

To study the impacts of reductions in employer’s social security contributions, we construct an intertemporal general equilibrium model with different types of workers (and wages), search unemployment and endogenous job destruction rates. Our model reproduces the empirical evidence that the...

Dans cet article, nous étudions les effets des critères d’attribution des allocations chômage dans un modèle de chômage d’équilibre où les efforts de recherche et les salaires sont endogènes. La prise en compte d’une durée d’emploi minimale exigée pour bénéficier des...

This paper studies the role of labor market institutions on unemployment and on the cyclical properties of job flows. We construct an intertemporal general equilibrium model with search unemployment and endogenous job turnover, and examine the consequences of introducing an unemployment benefit,...