I develop an agent-based computational economics (ACE) model with which I evaluate the aggregate impact of labor market policies. The findings are that governmentfinanced training measures increase the outflow rate from unemployment to employment. Although the overall effect is positive this...

Pension schemes that redistribute money to the elderly have seen a remarkable surge in developing countries. To explain this phenomenon we build a political economy model of a Beveridgean pay-as-you-go social security system which incorporates family transfers driven by costs of non-compliance...

Discrimination of women in the labor market requires appropriate policy interventions. Affirmative action policies typically advocate the introduction of an employment quota uniformly applied to all firms. In a heterogeneous labor market such a policy may yield avoidable welfare losses. We...

We estimate a linear and a piecewise linear Phillips curve model with regional labor market data for West German and Neue Länder. Employing regional observations allows us to country difference the data. This eliminates, under the assumption of homogeneous Länder, supply shocks and changes in...

The implementation of European Union directives into national law is at the discretion of member states. We analyze incentives for member states to deviate from these directives when the European Comission may sue a defecting member state and rulings at the European Court of Justice (ECJ) are...

When countries need to implement costly economic policy reforms, these often imply uncertainties about their effectiveness for the home country and their spillovers to other countries. We develop a model to show that under these circumstances countries implement too few or too many policy...

Social networks may affect workers' labor market outcomes. Using rich spatial data from administrative records, we analyze whether the employment status of neighbors influences the employment probability of a worker who lost his job due to a plant closure and the channels through which this...

A large body of evidence suggests that social comparisons matter for workers' valuation of the wage they receive. The consequences of social comparisons in imperfectly competitive labor markets are less well understood. We analyze an oligopsonistic model of the labor market where workers derive...

When countries need to implement costly economic policy reforms, these often imply uncertainties about their effectiveness for the home country and their spillovers to other countries. We develop a model to show that under these circumstances countries implement too few or too many policy...

What are the incentives for governments to coordinate their policies internationally when there is model disagreement and uncertainty? We build a model where countries disagree on policy targets and how policies affect the economies, and show that uncertainty not only determines the type of...