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...

This comprehensive study on UB-II-sanctions in Germany, applying PSM, presents the ex-post effects of welfare sanctions on several employment states for diverse (sub-)groups of employable welfare recipients. Besides unemployed, we also regard employed, and indirectly affected household members....

This paper discusses the impact of a gradual, pre-announced significant increase of the minimum wage during 2013-16 in Romania. The main finding is that the positive effects prevail when the starting level of increase in the minimum wage is very low and the economy is in a negative output gap....

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 depth of the Great Recession, the slow recovery of job creation, the downward trend in labor force participation, high long-term unemployment, stagnant or declining wages for low-to-medium skill jobs owing to adverse labor demand shifts, and a greater rebound in low-wage than mid- or...

We show that a minimum wage introduced in the presence of asymmetric information about worker productivities will lead to lower unemployment levels than predicted by the standard labour market model with heterogeneous labour and symmetric information. -- minimum wages ; unemployment ; asymmetric...

Individual labour productivities are often unobservable for firms when hiring new workers. Job protection may prevent firms ex post from using information about labour productivities. We show that a binding minimum wage introduced in the presence of job protection will lead to lower unemployment...

In August 2010 the Costa Rican government implemented a comprehensive program to increase compliance with legal minimum wages, the Campaign for Minimum Wages. To evaluate the impact of the Campaign, we use a regression discontinuity approach, which compares what happened to workers who before...

Do apparently large minimum wage increases in an environment of recession produce clearer evidence of disemployment effects than is typically observed in the new minimum wage literature? This paper augments the sparse literature on the most recent increases in the U.S. minimum wage, using three...