This paper presents and describes a new database of major minimum wage and collective bargaining (CB) shocks covering 26 advanced economies over the period 1970-2020. The main advantage of this dataset is the precise identification of the nature and date of major shocks, which is valuable in...

This paper quantifies the effect of Poland's 1999 pension reform on the inequality of future pension benefits. The reform increases inequality, both in the upper and lower parts of the distribution. The estimates, based on the 2012 Polish Household Budget Survey, show that the Gini coefficient...

This paper analyzes the effects of hypothetical MW (HMW) increases on social and fiscal outcomes in 21 European Union (EU) countries with a statutory national MW (NMW) based on a microsimulation approach using EUROMOD. The methodological challenges related to the use of available EU household...

Australia's "Transition to Retirement Income Streams" (TRIS) program aims to prolong labor force participation for older workers (aged 55-65 years) by offering early access to a worker's compulsory retirement savings (superannuation). Using a difference-in-differences design, our results suggest...

During the last decade, unemployment in Greece climbed up to 28%, almost quadrupling due to the economic crisis that hit Greece. In the present paper, we examine the determinants of the unemployment dynamics and the impact of the minimum wage on the probability of making a transition into and...

Hiring subsidies are widely used to create (stable) employment for the long-term unemployed. This paper exploits the abolition of a hiring subsidy targeted at long-term unemployed jobseekers older than 45 years of age in Belgium to evaluate its effectiveness in the short and medium run. Based on...

Aging is the foremost challenge in recent times, given the demographic shift in populations across the world. It implies the costs of healthcare burden and involves economic and social security challenges through shortage of labor supply, consumption-saving paradox, increase in expenditure on...

Would countercyclical fiscal policy during recessions improve or worsen the gender employment gap? We answer this question by exploring the state-dependent impact of fiscal spending shocks on employment by gender in the G-7 countries. Using the local projection method, we find that, during...

This paper examines the effect of a new maximum work hour restriction introduced in South Korea in 2018 that limited maximum working hours from 68 h/week to 52 h/week. I use difference-in-differences analysis with continuous treatment measuring the prevalence of those working longer than 52...

We use European Union Labour Force Survey data for the period 2005-2018 to investigate the cyclicality of training in Europe. Consistent with the view that firms use recessions as times to update skills, we find that training participation is moderately countercyclical for the employed. Within...