We show that a stronger earnings relationship of unemployment compensation reduces wages and increases employment in an economy in which wages are determined by a trade union that maximises the rent from unionisation. The opposite result applies for a utilitarian union. Using manufacturing and...

The development of the unemployment rate differs substantially between OECD countries. In recent years some countries experienced a mild increase, other countries had a stable unemployment rate, while there are also 'successful' countries in which the unemployment rate decreased a lot. A common...

This paper analyses the impact of the global economic crisis on unemployment and long term unemployment in the OECD. It uses simple econometric models using panel data (quarterly) and time series data. In general, we find that long term unemployment increases with the unemployment rate, there is...

We use a range of data sources to assess if, and to what extent, government redistribution policies have slowed or accelerated the trend towards greater income disparities in the past 20-25 years. In most countries, inequality among non-elderly households has widened during most phases of the...

The multivariate technique of factor analysis is used to combine several indicators of economic integration and international transactions into a single measure or index of globalization. The index is an alternative to the simple measure of openness based on trade, and it produces a ranking of...

In this paper, we analyze the impact of a tax policy change on social welfare by using jointly a collective model of household labor supply and a microsimulation program of the French taxbenefit system. The collective approach allows studying the intrahousehold distribution so that for the first...

The literature on household behavior contains hardly any empirical research on the withinhousehold distributional effect of tax-benefit policies. We simulate this effect in the framework of a collective model of labor supply when shifting from a joint to an individual taxation system in France....

Several theoretical contributions, starting with McElroy and Horney (1981) and Manser and Brown (1980), have suggested to model household behavior as a Nash-bargaining game. Since then, very few attempts have been made to operationalize cooperative models of household labor supply for policy...

Recent research on the behavioral effects of income taxes has to a large extent focused on the elasticity of taxable income with respect to the net-of-tax rate, i.e., one minus the marginal tax rate. We offer new evidence on this matter by making use of a large panel of Swedish tax payers over...

In this paper, we define a new class of richness measures. In contrast to the often used headcount, these new measures are sensitive to changes in rich persons' income and therefore allow for a more sophisticated analysis of richness. We demonstrate the application of these new measures to...