In exploring the impact of tax policy on labor-market performance, the paper first investigates how tax reform impacts labor supply and equilibrium unemployment in representative agent models.The impact of tax policy on labor market performance depends importantly on various other labor-market...

According to the permanent income / life-cycle hypothesis (PILCH), under standard preferences anticipated changes in employment status should not affect the changes in consumption. In this paper, we investigate the consumption behaviour of individuals who lose their jobs and those who find a...

One of the long-standing puzzles in economics is why wages do not fall sufficiently in recessions so as to avoid increases in unemployment. Put differently, if the competitive market wage declines, why don't employers simply force their employees to accept lower wages as well? As an alternative...

We study the impact of an anticipated "baby boom" in an overlapping generations economy.The rise of the working population lowers the wage, and the high demand for assets causes a rise in the price of capital which will be reversed when the baby boomers leave the work-force.However, the swings...

The paper studies simple strategies of labor tax reform in a search and matching model of the labor market featuring endogenous labor supply.Changing the composition of the tax wedge|that is, reducing a payroll tax and increasing a progressive wage tax such that the marginal tax wedge remains...

Empirical findings that minorities typically attain lower economic status than majorities and that relatively larger minorities perform worse than smaller ones pose a challenge to economics.To explain this scale puzzle, I model an economy where the society is bifurcated into two social groups...

We present a theoretical and empirical analysis of different types of active labor market policies (ALMP).In our empirical analysis we use data on 20 OECD countries covering the time period 1985-1999.We find that labor market training is the most effective program to bring down...

Numerous researchers have incorporated labor or credit market frictions within simple neoclassical models to (i) facilitate quick departures from the Arrow-Debreu world, thereby opening up the role for institutions, (ii) inject some realism into their models, and (iii) explain cross country...

We develop a dynamic general equilibrium model where workers can engage in search while on the job.We show that on-the-job search is a key component in explaining labor market dynamics in models of equilibrium unemployment.The model predicts fluctuations of unemployment, vacancies, and labor...