Since July 2004 the job search effort of long-term unemployed benefit claimants is monitored in Belgium. We exploit the discontinuity in the treatment assignment at the age of 30 to evaluate the effect of a notification sent at least 8 months before job search is verified. The threat of...

This paper develops a partial equilibrium job search model to study the behavioral and welfare implications of an Unemployment Insurance (UI) scheme in which job search requirements are imposed on UI recipients with hyperbolic preferences. We show that, if the search requirements are well...

This paper studies optimal income taxation in an environment where matching frictions generate a trade-off for workers between high wages and low unemployment risk. A higher marginal tax rate shifts the trade-off in favor of low unemployment risk, whereas a higher tax burden or unemployment...

This paper investigates the impact of workplace breastfeeding laws on the labor supply of mothers. We exploit a unique setting, when throughout 1998-2009 states in the US introduced laws requiring employers to provide break time and a private room for women to express milk or breastfeed. Our...

This paper explores the short-term employment effect of deregulating job protection forregular workers and how it varies with prevailing business cycle conditions. We apply a localprojection method to a newly constructed 'narrative' dataset of major regular job protectionreforms covering 26...

I review theories and evidence on labor market policies and institutions in an international context. These include collective bargaining, minimum wages, employment protection laws, unemployment insurance (UI), mandated parental leave, and active labor market policies. Scandinavia and Central...

We estimate the elasticity of private-sector employment to non-oil GDP in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) for GCC nationals and expatriates using a Seemingly Unrelated Error Correction (SUREC) model. Our results indicate that the employment response is lower for nationals, who have an...

Dube, Lester, and Reich (2010) argue that state-level minimum wage variation can be correlated with economic shocks, generating spurious evidence that higher minimum wages reduce employment. Using minimum wage variation within contiguous county pairs that share a state border, they find no...

This paper evaluates the worker-level effects of a historically large and permanent increase in the minimum wage in Lithuania. Our identification strategy leverages variation in workers’ exposure to the new minimum wage, and exploits the fact that there has been no increase in the minimum...

We quantify the extent to which public-sector employment crowds out private-sector employment using specially assembled datasets for a large cross-section of developing and advanced countries, and discuss the implications for countries in the Middle East, North Africa, Caucasus and Central Asia....