In the discussion about employment protection, little attention has been given to judicial mistakes. In most countries, only in the case of dismissals due to economic reasons, the employee is entitled to a severance payment. Given judicial mistakes when reviewing a dismissal, shirkers might...

This paper investigates the effects of using dismissal taxes to finance unemployment benefits. We compare dismissal and employment taxes in a model with search frictions. Employment taxes give rise to externalities because firms do not take into account the effects their dismissal decisions have...

The aim of this paper is to study the optimal duration of unemployment benefit entitlement duration across the business cycle. We wonder if the entitlement duration should be prolonged in bad and shortened in good times. Because of consumption smoothing, such a countercyclical policy can be...

In a New Keynesian DSGE model with labor market frictions and liquidity-constrained consumers aggregate unemployment is likely to increase due to a non-persistent government spending shock. Furthermore, the group of asset-holding households reacts very differently from the group of...

In the discussion about employment protection, little attention has been given to judicial mistakes. In most countries, only in the case of dismissals due to economic reasons, the employee is entitled to a severance payment. Given judicial mistakes when reviewing a dismissal, shirkers might...

In a dynamic model of fiscal policy, social polarization provokes a deficit bias. Policy advisors have recently proposed that governments running a deficit should be forced to generate additional tax revenue. We show that this deficit taxation reduces each group's spending bias today because it...

This paper investigates the effects of using dismissal taxes to finance unemployment benefits. We compare dismissal and employment taxes in a model with search frictions. Employment taxes give rise to externalities because firms do not take into account the effects their dismissal decisions have...

In the theoretical literature, the effects of employment protection on unemployment are ambiguous. Higher employment protection reduces job creation as well as job destruction. However, in most models, wages are bargained individually between workers and firms. Using a conventional matching...

This paper develops a medium-scale dynamic, stochastic, general equilibrium (DSGE) model for fiscal policy simulations. Relative to existingmodels of this type, our model incorporates a two-country monetary union structure, which makes it well suited to simulate fiscal measures by relatively...

The current crisis and discussions, in the euro area in particular, show that sovereign debt crises/defaults are no longer restricted to developing economies. After crises in many Latin American countries, the literature on quantitative dynamic macro-models of sovereign default has been...