In the last few decades, real GDP growth and investment in advanced countries have declined in tandem. This slowdown was not the result of weak demand (there has been no shift along the Okun curve), but of a decline in potential output growth (which has shifted the Okun curve to the left). We...

This paper studies the macroeconomic effects and sequencing of (LMRs) and product (PMRs) market reforms in Morocco. It finds that introducing LMRs and PMRs simultaneously would add about 2.5 percentage points (pp) of GDP growth and reduce unemployment by about 2.2 pp after five years. If...

Motivated by recent interest and initiatives taken by several governments and international organizations to come up with indicators of well-being to inform policy makers, we test if subjective well-being measures (SWB) can be employed to study voting behaviour. Controlling for financial and...

We analyze the optimal regional pattern of public employment in an information-constrained second-best redistribution policy showing that regionally differentiated public employment can serve as an expenditure side tagging device, bypassing or relaxing the equity-efficiency trade-off. The...

This paper provides estimates of the economic impact of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) in China and India for the period 2012-2030. Our estimates are derived using WHO's EPIC model of economic growth, which focuses on the negative effects of NCDs on labor supply and capital accumulation. We...

In many countries, Employment Protection Legislation (EPL) establishes less strict dismissal procedures for specific groups of workers. This paper builds a simple matching model with heterogeneous workers in order to analyze this feature of EPL. We use the model to analyze the effects of reforms...

Employment agencies aim to match individuals to appropriate jobs. There are public and private employment agencies, which co-exist in many countries. Selection effects may be relevant in the sense that private agencies potentially engage in 'cream-skimming' by prioritizing highly qualified...