Payroll taxes represent a major distortionary influence of governments on labor markets. Thispaper examines the role of payroll taxation and the social safety net for cyclical fluctuations ina nonmonetary economy with labor market frictions and unemployment insurance, when thelatter is only...

In view of the demographic trends, most EU countries face the problem of a declining workforce in the future. Understanding the interaction between income support systems (such asunemployment benefits, social assistance, early retirement and pension systems) and totallabor supply is of crucial...

A significant fraction of the labor force consists of employed workers who are part-timeunemployed (underemployed) in the sense that they are unable to work as much as theyprefer. This paper develops a search and matching model to study the design of optimalunemployment insurance in an economy...

This study examines the determinants of job-finding rates of unemployment benefit recipientsunder the Chilean program. This is a unique, innovative program that combines socialinsurance through a solidarity fund (SF) with self-insurance in the form of unemploymentinsurance savings accounts...

When workers send applications to vacancies they create a network. Frictions arise becauseworkers typically do not know where other workers apply to and firms do not know whichcandidates other firms consider. The first coordination friction affects network formation, whilethe second coordination...

The introduction of firm size into labor search models raises the question how wages are setwhen average and marginal product differ. We develop and analyze an alternative to theexisting bargaining framework: Firms compete for labor by publicly posting long- termcontracts. In such a competitive...

We use individual data for Great Britain over the period 1992-2009 to compare the probabilitythat employed and unemployed job seekers find a job and the quality of the job they find. Thejob finding rate of unemployed job seekers is 50 percent higher than that of employed jobseekers, and this...

We explore whether finance influences the impact of labour market institutions onunemployment. Using a data set of 18 OECD countries over 1980-2004, we estimate a panelVectorAutoRegressive model. We check whether causalities from labour market variables tounemployment are affected by financial...

This paper studies the impact of product and labor market regulations on informality andunemployment in a general framework where formal and informal firms are subject to thesame externalities, differing only with respect to some parameter values. Both formal andinformal firms have monopoly...

This paper analyzes the effects of different labor market institutions on inflation and outputvolatility. The eurozone offers an unprecedented experiment for this exercise: since 1999, nonational monetary policies have been implemented that could account for volatilitydifferences across member...