Many countries suffer from persistently high unemployment rates. The scope for labour market reforms is often limited to measures that hurt neither shareholders nor workers. This paper develops a policy proposal, which allows the government to reduce wage costs without changing the income...

This paper studies the effects of labour market reforms on the functional distribution of income in a DSGE model (Roeger et al., 2008) with skill differentiation, in which households supply three types of labour: low-, medium- and high-skilled. The households receive income from labour, tangible...

The macroeconomic effects on growth, investment and private sector employment of different ways of rolling back the welfare state are analysed. Cutting public spending on private goods induces a lower interest rate, a higher wage, a lower capital stock and a fall in employment. Cutting public...

We consider an economy characterised by involuntary unemployment among low skilled workers, and investigate the implications for employment and income of welfare schemes often advocated as less distortionary. We show that reducing unemployment benefits in favour of income subsidies (social...