The importance of referral hiring which is workers finding employment via social contacts is nowadays an empirically well documented fact. It also has been shown that social networks for finding jobs can create stratification. These analyses are by and large based on exogenous network...

This paper studies the effectiveness of different types of cohesion policies with respect to convergence of regions. A two-region agentbased macroeconomic model is used to analyze short-, medium- and long-term effects of policies improving human capital and fostering adoption of technologies in...

The implementation of European Union directives into national law is at the discretion of member states. We analyze incentives for member states to deviate from these directives when the European Commission may sue a defecting member state and rulings at the European Court of Justice (ECJ) are...

In recent decades, redistributive pension schemes have seen a remarkable surge in developing countries, particularly in the form of so-called social or non-contributory pension schemes. We note that many of these redistributive schemes target the rural elderly and correlate with higher urban...

Wages and employment are too low in a monopsony. Furthermore, a minimum wage or a subsidy may raise employment up to its first-best level. First, we analyze whether these important predictions still hold if workers compare their income to that of a reference group. Second, we show that the...

I develop an agent-based computational economics (ACE) model with which I evaluate the aggregate impact of labor market policies. The findings are that government-financed training measures increase the outflow rate from unemployment to employment. Although the overall effect is positive this...

When enacting labor market regulation governments face courts that interpret and implement the legal code. We show that the incentives for governments for labor market reform increase with the uncertainty that is involved in the implementation of legal codes through courts. Given that judges...

Labor courts play an important role in determining the effective level of labor market regulation in Germany, but their application of law may not be even-handed. Based on a simple theoretical model and a new panel data set, we identify a nomination bias in labor court activity - that is, court...