In response to high and enduring youth unemployment, large payroll tax cuts for young workers were implemented in two Swedish reforms in 2007 and 2009. This paper analyses the effects of the reforms on worker outcomes and firm performance in the retail industry, an important employer of young...

We use a youth payroll tax cut in Sweden to investigate whether retail firms that were exposed to substantial labor cost savings increased employment of minimum wage workers more than firms that received smaller labor cost savings. Our dataset includes information on both contracted wages and...

This paper uses administrative employer-employee data to uncover the effects of a large payroll tax reduction for minimum-wage workers in France. Exploiting the change in labor costs both at the job level and at the firm level, I find that the policy spurred an additional 13 percentage points...

The Swedish employer paid payroll tax was reduced substantially for young workers in 2007, causing firms' average social fees to depend on the age structure of their employees. Using pre-reform conditions to define treated and control firms, we show that the lower costs induced by the reduced...