This paper investigates how a mandatory activation program in Denmark affects the job finding rate of unemployed workers.The activation program was introduced in an experimental setting where about half of the workers who became unemployed in the period from November 2005 to March 2006 were...

In this paper, we investigate the relationship between financial wealth, reservation wages and labour market transitions. According to the theory, higher levels of wealth will result in higher reservation wages and lower employment probabilities. We test for the validity of this assumption by...

This paper studies how changes in the two key parameters of unemployment insurance - the benefit replacement rate (RR) and the potential duration of benefits (PBD) - affect the duration of unemployment.In 1989, the Austrian government made unemployment insurance more generous by changing,...

This paper develops a two-country two-sector endogenous growth model with a dual labour market based on efficiency wages. Growth is driven by Research done in the (high-tech) tradeable sector. The follower country tends to grow faster the greater the productivity gap from the leader country, but...

This paper analyzes the design of optimal unemployment insurance in a search equilibrium framework where search effort among the unemployed is not perfectly observable.We examine to what extent the optimal policy involves monitoring of search effort and benefit sanctions if observed search is...

This paper explores the optimal interaction between the tax system and unemployment compensation in insuring people against the risks of involuntary unemployment and low ability.To that end, we introduce search unemployment in a model of optimal non-linear income taxation.We find that the...