The paper examines the employment and unemployment implications of permitting unemployed people to use part of their unemployment benefits to provide employment vouchers to the firms that hire them. This opportunity to transfer unemployment benefits into employment subsidies--“benefit...

The paper analyzes the wage-employment effects of replacing unemployment benefits by negative income taxes. It first surveys the major equity and efficiency effects of unemployment benefits versus negative income taxes, and summarizes the salient features of many European unemployment benefit...

The paper surveys unemployment policies for advanced market economies and evaluates them by examining the predictions of the underlying macroeconomic theories. The basic idea is that, for the most part, different unemployment policy prescriptions rest; on different macroeconomic theories, and...

This paper explores the optimal design of subsidies for hiring unemployed workers ("employment vouchers" for short) in the context of a simple macroeconomic model of the labor market. Focusing on the short-term and long-term effects of the vouchers on employment and unemplkoyment, the analysis...

The paper analyzes the influence of minimum wages on firms' incentive to train their employees. We show that this influence rests on two countervailing effects: minimum wages (i) augment wage compression and thereby raise firms' incentives to train and (ii) reduce the profitability of employees,...

This paper reviews a new approach to the design of unemployment policies. It focuses on polciies that have become an increasingly popular weapon against long-term unempoloyment, namely, policies that subsidize the hiring of the long-term unemployed. Whereas the existing literature usually...

This paper argues that an important group of labor market policies are complementary in the sense that the effect of each policy is greater when implemented in conjunction with the other policies than in isolation. This may explain why the diverse, piecemeal labor market reforms in many European...