We explore the far-reaching implications of replacing current unemployment benefit (UB) systems by an unemployment accounts (UA) system. Under the UA system, employed people are required to make ongoing contributions to their UAs and the balances in these accounts are available to them during...

This paper studies the price and employment response of firms to the introduction of a nation-wide minimum wage in Germany. Widely throughout the economy, affected firms responded by rapidly and frequently increasing prices without cutting employment. These decisions are strongly interrelated:...

In this paper, we exploit a panel of industry-level data in European countries to study the economic impact of national reductions in usual weekly working hours between 1995 and 2007. Our identification strategy relies on the five national reforms that took place over this period and on initial...

The current crisis, while of a global nature, has affected national labor markets to a varying extent. While some countries have experienced a steep increase in unemployment, employment in other developed economies has not fallen in parallel with a significant decline in GDP. Our analysis shows...

December 1, 1996 Portugal introduced a new law on working hours which gradually reduced the standard workweek from 44 hours to 40 hours. We study how this mandatory working hours reduction affected employment and earnings of workers involved. We find for workers who were affected by the new law...

Macro-level changes can have substantial effects on the distribution of resources at the household level. While it is possible to speculate about which groups are likely to be hardest-hit, detailed distributional studies are still largely backward-looking. This paper suggests a straightforward...

We study the consequences of a working time reduction (WTR hereafter) in an exogenous growth model with unemployment (due to efficiency wage considerations) and a renewable natural resource. The resource is an essential input whose marginal productivity is bounded by physical laws. In the...

A recent decline in geographic mobility in the United States may have been caused in part by falling house prices, through the "lock in" effects of financial constraints faced by households whose housing debt exceeds the market value of their home. I analyze the relationship between such "house...