Using cross-country time series panel regressions for the last two decades, this paper seeks to identify the main policy and institutional factors that explain the share of self-employment across European countries. It looks at the aggregate share of self-employed as well as its breakdown by...

We derive the optimal contract between a principal and a liquidity-constrained agent in a stochastically repeated environment. The contract comprises a court-enforceable explicit bonus rule and an implicit fixed salary promise that must be self-enforcing. Since the agent's rent increases with...

Civil servants have a bad reputation of being lazy. However, citizens' personal experiences with civil servants appear to be significantly better. We develop a model of an economy in which workers differ in laziness and in public service motivation, and characterise optimal incentive contracts...

By how much does an increase in operating effectiveness of a public employment agency (PEA) and a reduction of unemployment benefits reduce unemployment? Using a recent labour market reform in Germany as background, we find that an enhanced effectiveness of the PEA explains about 20% of the...

This paper shows that outsourcing of parts of the workforce in unionized firms leads to wage moderation and as long as the share of the outsourced workforce is not too large, this wage-moderation effect on domestic employment outweighs the direct substitution effect so that domestic employment...

This paper is based on the ideas of political philosopher John Rawls who suggested that a just society is one which would be created behind a "veil of ignorance", that is to say, without knowing where one would end up in the society's distribution of talent and other attributes valued in the...

We study empirically how various labor market institutions - (i) union density, (ii) unemployment benefit remuneration, and (iii) employment protection - shape fiscal multipliers and output volatility. Our theoretical model highlights that more stringent labor market institutions attenuate both...