This paper investigates the employment impact of a new tax-credit programme that was put in place in France in 2001. We study the introduction of both this measure and a later reform in 2004 that made the tax credit cashable in advance upon returning to work. We adopt a non-experimental...

Dynamic microsimulation models applied to economics were first introduced in the United States at the end of the 1960’s. Since the 1980’s, they have been rapidly developing due to the increase in computational capabilities and to the availability of longitudinal data. Dynamic microsimulation...

The paper endorses the thesis that current macro imbalances are partly due to an excess of household savings in China, whose origin is to be found among other things in household uncertainty about the provision of public services like health care, pensions and education. Focusing on health...

This paper reviews the arguments for and against the ‘Stability and Growth Pact’ signed by the countries of the Euro area. We find the theoretical debate to be inconclusive, as both externality and credibility arguments can be used to yield opposite, and equally plausible conclusions. We...

The application of the policies prescribed by the Washington Consensus in developing countries is the subject of a vast literature. What is much less known is that there exist only one pure laboratory experiment implementing the Washington Consensus in the western world: Europe. The aim of this...