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

Within an efficiency-wage framework, we study the effects of two revenue-neutral tax reforms that change the progressivity of the labor tax system. A revenue-neutral increase in both the wage tax and the tax exemption and a revenue-neutral change in the composition of labor taxation towards the...

This paper studies a revenue-neutral green tax reform that substitutes energy for wage taxes in an open economy with unemployment. As long as the labour tax rate exceeds the energy tax rate, such a reform will increase employment, reduce the domestic firms' unit cost of production and hence...

According to the existing literature, capital taxes should not be imposed in the presence of optimal profit taxation in either unionized or competitive labour markets. We show that this conclusion does not hold for economies with dual labour markets where the competitive wage rate provides the...

When consumers choose between clean and dirty goods and the labour market clears, a green tax reform may not bring about a double dividend in the sense of increasing environmental quality and increasing employment. However, when firms choose between clean and dirty factors of production, and...