This paper examines whether differences in welfare regimes shape the incentives to work and get educated. Using microeconomic data for more than 100,000 European individuals, the results show that welfare regimes make a difference for wages and education. First, people- and household-based...

The paper presents a stochastic insider-outsider model that accounts for the following stylized facts: (1) unemployment rates display a high degree of serial correlation, or `persistence'; (2) the average rate of unemployment has been higher in the United States than in Europe over the 1950s and...

The paper analyses complementarities among a variety of labour market policies. It shows: (a) that a wide range of labour market institutions (e.g. unemployment benefits, job security legislation and payroll taxes) have complementary effects on unemployment; and thus (b) that policies aimed at...

This paper analyses information from survey data collected in the framework of the Eurosystem’s Wage Dynamics Network (WDN) on patterns of firm-level adjustment to shocks. We document that the relative intensity and the character of price vs. cost and wage vs. employment adjustments in...

This paper analyzes the contribution of the minimum wage to the well documented rise in earnings inequality in Mexico between the late 1980s and the early 2000s. We find that a substantial part of the growth in inequality, and essentially all the growth in inequality in the bottom end, is due to...

What is the impact of raising the minimum wage on family incomes? Analysing the characteristics of low wage workers, I find that those who earn near-minimum wages are disproportionately female, unmarried and young, without post-school qualifications and overseas born. About one-third of...

Failure in the training market may result from credit constraints and the inability to insure against labour income uncertainty, deterring potential trainees, or labour market imperfections that create external benefits for firms. This paper constructs a model of a training market affected by...

We develop a simple model of short- and long-term unemployment to study how labour market institutions interact with labour market conditions and personal characteristics of the unemployed. We analyze how the decision to exit unemployment and to mitigate human capital degradation by retraining...

This paper offers a model of the interaction between composition of jobs and labour market regulation. Ex-post rent-sharing due to search frictions implies that ‘good’ jobs which have higher creation costs must pay higher wages. This wage differential distorts the composition of jobs, and in...

Recent studies have shown that there are significant earnings differentials between immigrants and natives in Switzerland. The goal of this paper is to determine whether these differences can be attributed to diverging socio-economic endowments or to discrimination. We use the well-known...