The European Union has recently proposed sectoral tax differentiatio as a policy to fight unemployment. The member countries are allowed to reduce the VAT rates on goods and services that are particularly labor intensive and price elastic. The paper provides a theoretical analysis of the effects...

Collective bargaining agreements have been said to decrease deployment since the work of Calmfors and Driffill (1988). We investigate empirically whether opening clauses, flexible elements that have been introduced to reduce the decline in coverage, can indeed minimise this effect and increase...