With an equal social structure, China seems to be better prepared for a functioning democracy than other developing countries. It has stayed authoritarian because the CCP has successfully diverted the demand for democratization through tactics of economic growth, expansion of civil liberty, and...

We examine the optimal labor market-policy mix over the business cycle. In a search and matching model with risk-averse workers, endogenous hiring and separation, and unobservable search effort we first show how to decentralize the constrained-efficient allocation. This can be achieved by a...

In 2005 the German government implemented the so-called Hartz IV reform, which amounted to a complete overhaul of the German unemployment insurance system and resulted in a significant reduction in unemployment benefits for the long-term unemployed. In this paper, we use an incomplete-market...