The paper studies simple strategies of labor tax reform in a search and matching model of the labor market featuring endogenous labor supply.Changing the composition of the tax wedge|that is, reducing a payroll tax and increasing a progressive wage tax such that the marginal tax wedge remains...

Abstract: With the emergence of the Great Recession unemployment insurance (UI) is once again at the heart of the policy debate. In this paper, we review the recent theoretical and empirical evidence on the labor market effects of UI design. We also discuss policy issues related to UI design,...

Recent evaluations of active labor market policies are not very optimistic about their effectiveness to bring unemployed back to work.An important reason is that unemployed get locked-in, that is they reduce their effort to find a regular job.This paper uses an administrative dataset from the...

Employment protection is often related to costs incurred by the firms when they hire a worker.The stability of the employment relationship, enhanced by employment protection, is also favorable to the productivity of the job.We analyze employment protection focusing on this trade-off between...

The development of the unemployment rate di¤ers substantially between OECD countries.In this paper we investigate to what extent these differences are related to labor market institutions.In our analysis we use data of eighteen OECD countries over the period 1960-1994 and show that the way in...

This paper provides a comprehensive evaluation of benefit sanctions, i.e. temporary reductions in unemployment benefits as punishment for noncompliance with eligibility requirements. In addition to the effects on unemployment durations, we evaluate the effects on post-unemployment employment...

This paper is on compulsion in active labour market programs (ALMP). When an unemployed worker has to participate in a programme order to remain eligible for benefits there are two separate effects. First, there is the treatment effect, i.e. the program makes the worker more attractive for a...