The creeping stock market collapse eroded the wealth of funded pension systems. This led to political tensions between generations due to the fuzzy definition of property rights on the pension funds wealth. We argue that this problem can best be resolved by the introduction of generational...

Private pension provision faces the challenging task of providing stable income streams during retirement. The challenge has increased markedly in the last decades due to volatile financial markets, falling interest rates and the withdrawal of employers and external insurers as risk bearers of...

An opinion poll on a representative sample of Italian citizens suggests that it does. We focus on reforms that would lengthen retirement age and/or cut pension benefits. After controlling for individual features of the respondent, we find that individuals who are more informed about the costs...

This paper explores the optimal design of subsidies for hiring unemployed workers (‘employment vouchers’ for short) in the context of a simple macroeconomic model of the labour market. Focusing on the short-term and long-term effects of the vouchers on employment and unemployment, the...

The paper explores the employment implications of allowing people the opportunity of using a portion of their incapacity benefits to provide employment vouchers for employers that hire them. The analysis indicates that introducing this policy could increase employment, raise the incomes of...

This paper investigates the average effects of (firm-provided) workplace health promotion measures in form of the analysis of sickness absenteeism and health circles/courses on labour market out¬comes of the firms’ employees. Exploiting linked employer-employee panel data that consist of rich...

The paper examines the employment and unemployment implications of permitting unemployed people to use part of their unemployment benefits to provide employment vouchers to the firms that hire them. This opportunity to transfer unemployment benefits, `benefit transfers', would help replace the...

Popular characterizations of union preferences assume that the income of laid-off union members is exogenous. There is evidence, however, of intra-union distribution schemes such as severance payments, unemployment insurance, retraining arrangements and early retirement schemes. This paper...

The central objective of this paper is to assess the empirical relevance of labour adjustment costs arising from institutional rigidities and to compare their importance across countries. It thus develops a simple dynamic bargaining model of the union monopoly type that, for the first time,...

The model developed in this paper examines the relationship between firing costs and unemployment in a simple two-period model with uncertainty. Where there are long-term employment relationships, and where risk-averse workers and risk-neutral firms bargain over wages and firing costs, average...