So-called activation policies aiming at bringing jobless people into work have been a central component of welfare reforms across OECD countries during the last decades. Such policies combine restrictive and enabling programs, but their characteristic feature is that also enabling programs are...

This paper considers the optimal level of firm-specific training by taking into account the positive effect of training on the expected duration of workers current employment. In the framework of an efficiency wage model, a short expected job tenure represents a disamenity that reduces the...

Superneutrality is demonstrated to no longer hold in the Sidrauski model as soon as agents are heterogenous with regard to their productivity. However, quantitative effects of inflation on the capital stock are found to be rather small.

We study decentralized and optimal urbanization in a simple multi-sector model of a rural-urban economy focusing on productivity differences and internal trade frictions. We show that even in the absence of the typical externalities studied in the literature, such as agglomeration, congestion or...

Two alternative relative compensation schemes are compared with respect to total output that can be generated at a given sum of salaries. While the promotion regime guarantees that any salary increase is permanent, the premium system allows a reduction in the income of an agent to the base...

In this paper we construct a stylised general equilibrium macromodel to show that demand led expansions may have unexpected effects when market imperfections lead to changes in labour productivity. We find some empirical support, from a number of European countries, for the main predictions of...

The social and the private returns to education differ when education can increase productivity, and also be used to signal productivity. We show how instrumental variables can be used to separately identify and estimate the social and private returns to education within the employer learning...

How does pay-for-performance (P4P) impact productivity, multitasking, and the composition of workers in mission-oriented jobs? These are central issues in sectors like education or healthcare. We conduct a laboratory experiment, manipulating compensation and mission, to answer these questions....

We analyse how different labour market institutions - employment protection versus flexicurity - affect technology adoption in unionised firms. We consider both trade unions' incentives to oppose or endorse labour-saving technology, and firms' incentives to invest in such technology. We find...

We study the effect of a declining labor force on the incentives to engage in labor-saving technical change and ask how this effect is influenced by institutional characteristics of the pension scheme. When labor is scarcer it becomes more expensive and innovation investments that increase labor...