Four options to make the social security sustainable under the coming demographic shift are presented; increase payroll taxes by 6 percentage points, reduce replacement rates by one-third, raise the normal retirement age to 73, or means-test the benefits and reduce them in income. The paper...

The aim of this article is to analyse the consequences of the constraint of shareholder value creation on wages and on unemployment rates in equilibrium. We will show that the shareholder value created by a firm directly depends on the payroll. Therefore, both the firm's and the Unions' new...

This paper discusses broad trends in labour force participation and part-time employment across different age groups since the Great Recession and uses provincial data to identify changes related to population aging, cyclical effects and other factors. The main population age groups examined are...

See also the publication in the <I>European Economic Review</I>, 2002, 301-327.<P> The paper considers a two-country model of overlapping generations heterogenouseconomies with intergenerational transfers carried out in the form of bequest and investmentin human capital. We examine in competitive...</p></i>

The paper studies the determinants of income distribution and growth in an overlapping generations economy withheterogenous households. Our framework has the following main features:heterogeneity of consumers with respect to wealth and parental human capital;intergenerational transfers,...

The present paper provides an overview of literature on the shift to services. It follows the three dimensions of structural change - final demand, the inter-industry division of labor and inter-industry productivity differences. It first looks at the ‘classics’, however (Fisher (1935),...

This paper structurally models and estimates the employment effects of minimum wages in inflexible labor markets with fixed employment costs. When there are fixed costs associated with employment, minimum wage regulation not only results in a reduction in employment among low productivity...

Shimer's calibrated version of the Mortensen-Pissarides model generates unemployment fluctuates much smaller than the data. Hagedorn and Manovskii present an alternative calibration that yields fluctuations consistent with the data, but this has been challenged by Costain and Reiter, who say it...

This paper examines the evolution of hours worked in France, Germany, Italy and the US from 1956-2003 and assesses the role of taxes and technology to account for the differences. The empirical work establishes three results. First, hours worked in Europe decline by almost 45% compared to the US...

This paper studies lifetime aggregate labor supply with endogenous workweek length. Such a theory is needed to evaluate various government policies. A key feature of our model is a nonlinear mapping from hours worked to labor services. This gives rise to an endogenous workweek that can differ...