In response to high and enduring youth unemployment, large payroll tax cuts for young workers were implemented in two Swedish reforms in 2007 and 2009. This paper analyses the effects of the reforms on worker outcomes and firm performance in the retail industry, an important employer of young...

This paper discusses the impact of a gradual, pre-announced significant increase of the minimum wage during 2013-16 in Romania. The main finding is that the positive effects prevail when the starting level of increase in the minimum wage is very low and the economy is in a negative output gap....

This paper studies the price and employment response of firms to the introduction of a nation-wide minimum wage in Germany. Widely throughout the economy, affected firms responded by rapidly and frequently increasing prices without cutting employment. These decisions are strongly interrelated:...

This paper uses administrative employer-employee data to uncover the effects of a large payroll tax reduction for minimum-wage workers in France. Exploiting the change in labor costs both at the job level and at the firm level, I find that the policy spurred an additional 13 percentage points...