Enacted March 27, 2020, the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) was the most ambitious and creative fiscal policy response to the Pandemic Recession in the United States. PPP offers forgivable loans - essentially grants - to businesses with 500 or fewer employees that meet certain requirements. In...

We study retirement incentives with augmented option value model à la Stock and Wise (1990). We propose methodological extensions to better reflect the respective incentives faced by singles and couples. Our results show that a more comprehensive modelling of couples' incentives leads to very...

This paper proposes a new method to estimate the extent of job competition between workers with different schooling levels. We estimate the structural parameters of a matching function generalised to incorporate crowding out effects. We use flow data out of unemployment containing information on...

On the basis of aggregate data for the early nineties, we analyse the determinants of unemployment duration for laid-off male workers in Wallonia (Belgium). Our results demonstrate that if ranking in recruitment occurs, the standard Mixed Proportional Hazard specification can be too restrictive,...

In this paper we investigate whether unemployment traps exist and are significant in the transition from unemployment into employment in Belgium. In order to assess them, we use panel data sample selection models. Specifically, we estimate a parametric random effects models composed by a wage...

This paper is one of the first to examine how the use of fixed-term employment contracts (FTCs) affects firm competitiveness (i.e. productivity, wages and profits) while controlling for key econometric issues such as time-invariant unobserved workplace characteristics, endogeneity and state...

This paper is one of the first to estimate how the region in which an establishment is located affects its productivity, wage cost and cost competitiveness (i.e. its productivity-wage gap). To do so, we use detailed linked employer-employee panel data for Belgium and rely on methodological...

In several OECD countries age-targeted wage subsidies have been introduced to increase the employment of older workers, but evidence on their effectiveness is scarce. This paper examines the effects of a permanent wage cost subsidy in Belgium on the employment rate, working time and hourly wage....

We explore the link between health indicators and employment rates of the population aged 55 or more. Our focus lies on work capacity as a key determinant of employment. Using cohort mortality information as a proxy for overall health outcomes, we establish a substantial untapped work capacity...

We use micro data from the European Social Survey to investigate the impact of “culture of leisure” and taxes on labor force participation and hours worked of second-generation immigrants who reside in 26 European countries. These individuals are born in Europe, and they have been exposed to...