This paper argues that, for a given overall level of labour income taxation, a more progressive tax schedule reduces the unemployment rate and increases the employment rate. From a theoretical point of view, higher progressivity induces a wage-moderation effect and increases overall employment...

To study the impacts of reductions in employer’s social security contributions, we construct an intertemporal general equilibrium model with different types of workers (and wages), search unemployment and endogenous job destruction rates. Our model reproduces the empirical evidence that the...

The proportion of capacity-constrained firms in European economies remains today fairly small, which suggests that capacity shortages cannot be the direct and single cause of unemployment persistence. Inferring from this observation that low investment rates play no role in explaining the...

This paper focuses on the macroeconomic impact of introducing new technologies (among which information technologies) when the latter stimulate the relative demand for high-skilled labour. The fact that there is biased technical progress (or at least, that growth has asymmetric effects) is...

Past experiences and social forces have been incorporated into tastes in order to analyze various microeconomic issues. We use these extended preferences to model the making of standard-of-living aspirations and study their effect on macroeconomic variables. We concentrate first on consumption...

It is wellknown that unemployment benefits and minimum income guarantees generate an unemployment trap. The unemployment is indeed not enticed to work because he is imposed at a 100% marginal tax rate. In this paper, we design the optimal employment without risking its budget deficit. The...