This paper discusses the potential introduction of permanent public subsidies to supplement the wages of low-paid workers in Italy, taking inspiration from Edmund Phelps' ideas on supporting the working poor. We consider how a negative taxation scheme for low-wage earners might address...

Digitization has spurred interest in the potential of statistical profiling to improve the targeting of active labor market policies. Despite growing adoption, empirical evidence on the effectiveness of such profiling in program allocation is scarce. We evaluate a semi-automated statistical...

This paper evaluates a hiring subsidy for lower-educated youths in Flanders (Belgium) that reduced labour costs by approximately 13% for a period of two years, starting in 2016. Using a donut Regression Discontinuity Design, we find no evidence that the subsidy improved the job finding rate of...

Policies supporting small businesses are popular among policymakers but often criticised by economists for their potential to distort the economy. This paper provides a comprehensive evaluation of a unique policy that subsidises the first employee. Empirically, we find that the policy led to a...

This paper uses data from the 24 governorates in Tunisia over the period 2012-2020 to study the relationship between job insertion of higher education graduates into the formal labor market and a number of independent variables, namely active labor supply, labor demand, an active labor market...

Minijobs are subsidized small jobs below a fixed earnings threshold. Since a reform in 2003, they are viewed as stepping stones to the first labor market. However, the Minijob subsidy generates a 'Minijob trap' that causes vast bunching at the Minijob earnings threshold. Therefore, Midijobs were...