Many countries suffer from persistently high unemployment rates. The scope for labour market reforms is often limited to measures that hurt neither shareholders nor workers. This paper develops a policy proposal, which allows the government to reduce wage costs without changing the income...

We present an applied general equilibrium modelling approach to analyse employment and unemployment effects of labour tax cuts in an economy where wages are determined through firm-union bargaining at the sectoral level. In such a labour market regime, simulations for Germany show that labour...

In an efficiency wage economy with variable profits, a shift from payroll to employment taxes will reduce unemployment if the tax level is held constant at the initial wage. However, unemployment will rise if firms are constrained to zero profits in the long-run and if tax revenues are constant....

How will international integration affect welfare policies? This paper considers the possibilities of financing public sector activities (public consumption and social security expenses) by general (wage) taxation in an economy which becomes more integrated in international product markets. Even...

This paper shows that outsourcing of parts of the workforce in unionized firms leads to wage moderation and as long as the share of the outsourced workforce is not too large, this wage-moderation effect on domestic employment outweighs the direct substitution effect so that domestic employment...

What are the impacts of labor tax reform on wage setting and employment to keep the relative tax burden per low-skilled and high-skilled workers constant in the case of heterogenous domestic labor markets, i.e. imperfect competition in low-skilled labor and perfect competition in high-skilled...

This paper investigates the possible labour market and fiscal impacts of labour tax reductions in a typically Belgian setting, i.e. a wage norm regime with automatic price indexing of wages. We consider reductions in employers' social security contributions and fiscal compensation through value...

The employment effects of an ecological tax reform depend decisively on the presence of a profit tax and on the extent to which profits are taxed. This is shown in a model where firms have monopoly power on product markets and bargain over wages with unions on the labour market. In the setting,...