The paper examines whether the pattern of growth in euro area employment seen in the period 1997-2001 differed from that recorded in the past and what could be the reasons for that. First, a standard employment equation is estimated for the euro area as a whole. This shows that the lagged impact...

This paper exploits discontinuities induced by earnings caps for social security contributions (SSC) in Germany to analyse the effect of SSC on gross labour earnings. Empirical evidence is based on two complementary approaches utilising two administrative data sets. First, employment responses...