In 2002 the Quebec government implemented the Action Emploi (AE) program aimed at making work pay for long-term social assistance recipients (SA). AE offered a generous wage subsidy that could last up to three years to recipients who found a full-time job within twelve months. The program was...

It is widely acknowledged that earnings subsidies promote employment by increasing rewards to labor market activity. This paper asks whether subsidies also affect job duration and wage growth. We provide an analytical framework that identifies causal links between earnings subsidies, job...

We analyze the determinants of household work contracted in the German shadow economy. The German socio-economic household panel, which enumerates casual domestic employment, is used to estimate the demand for such household work. The regressors include regional wage rates, household income and...

Differently from most European countries and despite the recommendations on the part of the European Commission, Italy still misses a sufficiently systematic and nationwide mechanism of income support. In this paper we want to explore the feasibility, the desirability and the features of a...

This paper investigates the link between variation in the supply of workers who participate in specific types of active labour market policies (ALMPs) and firm performance using a new exceptionally informative German employer-employee data base. For identification we exploit that German local...

We report empirical evidence from the first field experiments to be conducted in Germany with program and control groups between 1999 and 2002. The evaluated program called Targeted Negative Income Tax (TNIT) is a time-restricted employee subsidy for means-tested welfare recipients. We focus on...

This paper advocates the cautious and constitutional evolution of existing basic income schemes (unemployment benefit II) and Targeted Negative Income Tax (TNIT = Einstiegsgeld) into a means-tested combi-wage model for the future long-term unemployed (gradualism strategy). The paper argues that,...

Marginal employment', i.e. employment at low working hours and earnings not covered by social security, has been gaining importance in the German economy over the past decade. Using a large newly available panel data set and statistical matching techniques, we analyse the effects of marginal...

In this article we propose and implement an instrumental variable estimation procedure to obtain treatment effects on duration outcomes. The method can handle the typical complications that arise with duration data of time-varying treatment and censoring. The treatment effect we define is in...

Liste di mobilità (LM) is an Italian labour market programme targeted to dismissed workers. It combines a 'passive' component granting monetary benefits to employees dismissed by firms larger than 15 employees, and an 'active' component providing an employment subsidy to any firm hiring workers...