We investigate how continental European unemployment can be reduced without reducing unemployment benefits and without reducing the net income of low-wage earners. Lower unemployment replacement rates reduce unemployment, the net wage and unemployment benefits. A lower tax on labour increases...

Labor market institutions, via their effect on the wage structure, affect the investment decisions of firms in labor markets with frictions. This observation helps explain rising wage inequality in the US, but a relatively stable wage structure in Europe in the 1980s. These different trends are...

Using data on 17 OECD countries for 1960-98, this paper studies the impact of unions on public employment incidence, using macrodata and microdata. Macrodata show that greater coverage by centralized collective bargaining institutions raises the public employment share, controlling for country...

Even when labour mobility is low, international intergation affects labour markets by making jobs more mobile. This runs via product market integration, which is an essential element of European integration. Increasing job mobility affects the possibilities single countries perceive in pursuing...

Workfare proposals concentrate on the work incentives for welfare recipients, thus focusing on the labor supply side. This paper analyzes the effects workfare has on labor demand when the labor market is unionized. As workfare reduces the number of recipients of public financial assistance, a...

This paper reviews the Italian unemployment experience, analyzing in particular the time-series behavior of unemployment rates along the path that brought Italy into Europe's Economic and Monetary Union, and their disaggregated structure across geographical and demographic dimensions. High...

By international standards, unemployment in Sweden remained remarkably low throughout the 1970s and the 1980s. In the early 1990s, however, the unemployment rate skyrocketed and hit double-digit levels. Unemployment remained high for several years but exhibited a marked fall from 1997 and...

Im vorliegenden Aufsatz werden die Gründe für den Unterschied zwischen den Arbeitlosenquoten in Europa und den Vereinigten Staaten erläutert. Nach Solow ist die Ursache der Arbeitslosigkeit nicht allein die Arbeitsmarktrigidität in Europa, sondern ebenfalls die geringe Nachfrage nach Arbeit,...