This paper bolsters Prescott's (2004) claim that high taxes are responsible for lacklustre labor market performance in continental European countries. We develop a lifecycle model with endogenous skill formation, endogenous labor supply, and endogenous retirement. Labor taxation distorts not...

Past reforms have put the Peruvian pension system on a largely fiscally sustainable path, but the system faces important challenges in providing adequate pension levels for a large share of the population. Using administrative microdata at the affiliate level, we project replacement rates in the...

What are the welfare implications of labor market power? We provide an answer to this question in two steps: (1) we develop a tractable quantitative, general equilibrium, oligopsony model of the labor market, (2) we estimate key parameters using within-firm-state, across-market differences in...

Concave hiring rules imply that firms respond more to bad shocks than to good shocks. They provide a unified explanation for several seemingly unrelated facts about employment growth in macro and micro data. In particular, they generate countercyclical movement in both aggregate conditional...

Concave hiring rules imply that firms respond more to bad shocks than to good shocks. They provide a unified explanation for several seemingly unrelated facts about employment growth in macro and micro data. In particular, they generate countercyclical movement in both aggregate conditional...

This short essay surveys recent literature on the competitive saving motive and its broader economic implications. The competitive saving motive is defined as saving to improve one's status relative to other competitors for dating and marriage partners. Here are some of the key results of the...

The job guarantee (JG) is a public option for jobs. It is a permanent, federally funded, and locally administered program that supplies voluntary employment opportunities on demand for all who are ready and willing to work at a living wage. While it is first and foremost a jobs program, it has...

The Italian jobs crisis consists of a high percentage of non-working labour force, matched with a high percentage of discouraged, long-term unemployed and inactive population. Not only a sharp deregulation of the job market is groundless, but even a hypothetic return to expansionary fiscal...

The Turkish social insurance system has been feverishly debated for years, particularly through its burden on the economy. The most recent reform is an attempt to neutralize the deterioration within the social security system and its effects on the economy. After the recent reform, ‘the way...

There has been a slowdown in growth in the world's most advanced economies. In this paper we argue that changing demographics, in particular aging populations combined with increased life expectancy, may be part of the explanation for why we observe slower growth, falling interest rates and...