The paper examines the implications of an important aspect of the ongoing reorganization of work - the move from occupational specialization toward multi-tasking - for centralized wage bargaining. The analysis shows how, on account of this reorganization, centralized bargaining becomes...

The modern welfare state and full-employment policies have common intellectual roots. From the very beginning, welfare-state arrangements and full-employment policies were regarded as strongly complementary.

How do we explain the poor employment performance in Western Europe since about the mid-1970s? This question is in fact twofold : what initiated the dramatic rise in unemployment, and what mechanisms have make it continue for so long. My attempts to answer these questions form the basis for a...

This paper analyzes the interplay between economic incentives and social norms in a public finance context. We assume that to live off one's own work is a social norm, and that the larger the population fraction adhering to this norm, the more intensely it is felt by the individual.

This paper analyzes the interplay between social norms and economic incentives in the context of work decision in the modern welfare state. We assume that to live off one's own work is a social norm, and that the larger the population fraction adhering to this norm, the more intensely it is felt...

We examine how tax avoidance in the form of trade in well-functioning asset markets affects the empirical study of labor supply. We discuss the implications for tax policy analysis, and we show that a failure to account for avoidance re-sponses may lead to huge errors when predicting how tax...

In a world where poor countries provide weak protection for intellectual property rights, market integration will systematically shift technical change in favor of rich nations. For this reason, free trade can increase international income differences. At the same time, integration with...

In developed countries, pension systems emerged as a political response to socio-econo-mic changes brought about by industrialisation and urbanisation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Today, new socio-economic changes create both rationales and poli-ti-cal forces for revisions of...

In this paper, the authors incorporate a positive theory of unemployment insurance into a dynamic overlapping generations model with search-matching frictions and on-the-job learning-by-doing. The model shows that societies populated by identical rational agents, but differing in the initial...