Imagine a government confronted with a controversial policy question, like whether it should cut the level of unemployment benefits. Will social welfare rise as a result? Will some groups be winners and other groups be losers? Will the welfare gap between the employed and unemployed increase?...

Regulation of standard workweek hours and overtime hours and pay can protect workers who might otherwise be required to work more than they would like to at the going rate. By discouraging the use of overtime, such regulation can increase the standard hourly wage of some workers and encourage...

Governments regulate employment to protect workers and to improve labor market efficiency. However, employment regulations can be controversial, often complicated by opposing ideological views. Thus, it is important for policymakers in developing countries to base decisions on empirical evidence...

Using a panel of MENA countries, this paper tries to examine the interaction between trade reforms and labor market regulations on the outcome of the labor market. The theoretical predictions on this literature show that the effects of trade liberalization in any given country are conditional on...

In this work we develop a set of labour market and fiscal policy experiments upon the labour and credit augmented "Schumpeter meeting Keynes" agent-based model. The labour market is declined under two institutional variants, the "Fordist" and the "Competitive" set- ups meant to capture the...

In this work we discuss the research findings from the labour-augmented Schumpeter meeting Keynes (K+S) agent-based model. It comprises comparative dynamics experiments on an artificial economy populated by heterogeneous, interacting agents, as workers, firms, banks and the government. The...

This article develops a theoretical model for evaluating mandatory activation of welfare recipients in complex activation programmes. The model aims to summarize and describe heterogeneous content that is difficult to comprehend because of local variations, staff characteristics, or other...

This paper surveys the emerging economics literature on the relationship between employee training and firm performance. Most studies find very high returns to training, at least from the perspective of firms, indicating that the costs of training can be recouped in short periods of time. These...

The need for better targeting of active labour market programmes is evident from the many evaluation studies that find insignificant or even negative effects. A statistical system could contribute to a more precise targeting of labour market programmes to those individuals who are likely to...

Caseworkers at the Swedish Public Employment Office (PES) have an important role in helping the unemployed to find a job. In this study, I estimate the effect of caseworkers on jobseekers' future employment rates, earnings, and wages. To take into account that the average characteristics of the...