The paper explores the consequences of macroeconomic policy for labor market outcomes in the presence of frictions. It shows how policy may be useful in overriding frictions, as well as how it might generate adverse outcomes. The analysis looks at the main tools of macroeconomic policy and...

This paper examines fiscal policy without commitment and the effects of conditional bailout loans. The government relies on distortionary taxation and decides between full debt repayment and costly default. It tends to overborrow due to myopia, which induces default to be a relevant policy...

We study the design of optimal monetary policy in a New Keynesian model with labor turnover costs in which wages are set according to a right to manage bargaining where the firms' counterpart is given by currently employed workers. Our model captures well the salient features of European labor...

This paper studies the prevalence and nature of zero-hours contracts (ZHCs) in the UK labour market. The headline count of ZHC workers based on the Labour Force Survey has long underestimated and continues to underestimate the number of workers in ZHC or ZHC-like jobs. ZHC jobs and workers are...

We study theoretically and empirically how consumers in an individual private longterm health insurance market with front-loaded contracts respond to newly mandated portability requirements of their old-age provisions. To foster competition, effective 2009, the German legislature made the...

Not all countries provide universal access to publicly funded paid sick pay. Amongst countries that do, compensation rates can be low and coverage incomplete. This leaves a significant role for employer-provided paid sick pay in many countries. In this paper, we study who has access to...

Market completeness has important implications for household behavior. I firmly reject complete markets for smallholders but am unable to do so for non-smallholders. This leads to important differences in production behavior: smallholders reallocate labor across activities less in response to...