Policy researchers often have to estimate the future effect of imposing a policy in a particular location. There is often evidence on the effects of similar policies in other jurisdictions, but no information on the effects of the policy in the jurisdiction in question. And the policy may have...

Starting from Professor Kornai's assertion about the necessity to focus on the long-term perspectives of the transformation process, we analyze in this paper the Lisbon performance of the countries of the European Union from such a long-term, structural perspective. We present in a simple form...

This paper deals with potential instabilities in the Eurozone stemming from an insufficient interplay between monetary policy and reform effort on the one hand and the emergence of intra-Euro area divergences on the other. As a first step, we assess the effect of EMU on structural reform and...

This paper estimates the welfare and distributional impact of two types of welfare reform in the 15 (pre-enlargement) member countries of the European Union. The reforms are revenue neutral and financed by an overall and uniform increase in marginal tax rates on earnings. The first reform...

In spite of there being few elements of tax or cash benefit systems in developed countries that are any longer explicitly gender-biased in a discriminatory sense, it is well recognised that they have significant gender effects. To the extent that women earn less than men on average under...

Living wage campaigns have succeeded in about 100 jurisdictions in the United States but have also been unsuccessful in numerous cities. These unsuccessful campaigns provide a better control group or counterfactual for estimating the effects of living wage laws than the broader set of all cities...

State and federal reforms of the 1990s transformed the U.S. cash assistance program for single parents and their children. Despite an extensive literature examining these changes and their impacts, there have been few studies that consider the effects of these reforms from the perspective of the...

Using European Community Household Panel data for nine countries for 1996-2001, I investigate the impact of reforms of employment protection systems on employment and on temporary jobs for wage and salary workers. Individual fixed effects models are estimated, with the inclusion of...

In this qualitative sociological and quantitative economic policy paper, we start out from the assumption of a very recent European Commission Background paper on the Efficiency and effectiveness of social spending, which says the effectiveness of social spending can be defined by the degree to...

Against the background of the current discussion on the introduction of statutory minimum wages in Germany, this paper analyzes the potential employment and fiscal effects of such a policy. Based on estimated labor demand elasticities obtained from a structural labor demand model, the empirical...