We investigate experimentally the economic effects of wage taxation to finance unemployment benefits for a closed economy and an international economy. The main findings are the following. (i) There is clear evidence of a vicious circle in the dynamic interaction between the wage tax and...

This discussion paper has resulted in an article in 'Economica', 2002, 69(273), 21-40.

This paper investigates the age-dependency of participation andunemployment by integrating job search with intertemporal optimizing behaviorof finitely-lived households. We find that search frictions and tax ratesdistort the decisions of older workers to a much larger extent than that ofyoung...

In the period before the second World War, the Dutch Bureau of Statistics had developed two sets of indicators ofunemployment in the Netherlands. One was based on statistical data of unemployment insurance funds of tradeunions and the other one on statistical data of labour exchanges. This paper...

This paper studies the relevance of social interactions among the unemployed. Identification is based on a salient and selective extension of the potential duration of unemployment benefits. If social interactions are important, this policy change affects entitled individuals not only directly,...

In this paper, we develop two hypotheses: First, regional innovation efforts have a positive impact on regional knowledge based entrepreneurial activity. Second, knowledge based entrepreneurship positively affects regional economic performance. We test these hypotheses using county level data...

We develop a two-sector endogenous growth model with a dual labour market resulting from the presence of an effort extraction function in one sector. Effort of workers can be influenced by pay and monitoring. This results in an endogenous non-competitive wage differential between sectors and a...

The influence of industrial structure, more specifically of business ownership, is investigated on the level of unemployment in Japan. The question is to what extent business ownership, i.e., entrepreneurship, can reduce the level of unemployment. It will be concluded that Japan is hardly an...

This paper examines the relationship between entrepreneurship (as measured by fluctuations in the business ownership rate) and unemployment in Japan for the period between 1972 and 2002. We find that, although Japan’s unemployment rate has been influenced by specific exogenous shocks, the...

We analyze a general search model with on-the-job search and sorting of heterogeneous workers into heterogeneous jobs. This model yields a simple relationshipbetween (i) the unemployment rate, (ii) the value of non-market time, and (iii) themax-mean wage differential. The latter measure of wage...