In this paper we consider a risk averse worker who is moving back and forth between employment and unemployment; layoffs are random and beyond the worker's influcence, while the re-employment chance is directly affected by search effort. We characterize the worker's optimal savings and...

This paper studies two-stage bargaining in a simple general equilibrium model with a dual labour market. We analyse the case where agreements reached at the central level in the union sector extend beyond this sector. Conditions are identified under which firms and unions have a commonality of...

Voluntary public unemployment systems are limited to a handful of countries, including Finland, Sweden, and, more substantially, Denmark. A voluntary system has the positive feature of other user-cost schemes, potentially efficient targeting of services. This presumes rational behavior as well...

This paper studies skill-neutral technological changes in an economy where workers differ with respect to their abilities to acquire skills, implying increasing marginal costs of educating the work force. Our main result is that productivity slowdown and increasing wage dispersion can be...

This project employs the theory of equality of opportunity, described in Roemer’s book (Equality of Opportunity, Harvard University Press, 1998), to compute the extent to which tax-and-transfer regimes in ten countries equalize opportunities among citizens for income acquisition. Roughly...

This paper evaluates the tax treatment of married couples in OECD countries. While the existing literature has emphasized the relation between marginal taxes and hours of work, the novelty of our analysis is the incorporation of labor force participation responses. Indeed, the modern empirical...

We reconsider the result that efficient taxation involves a lower marginal tax on secondary earners than on primary earners. Introducing labor force participation responses into the analysis, we show that a second-earner tax allowance is better than selective marginal tax rates.