We explore the far-reaching implications of replacing current unemployment benefit (UB) systems by an unemployment accounts (UA) system. Under the UA system, employed people are required to make ongoing contributions to their UAs and the balances in these accounts are available to them during...

This paper examines whether differences in welfare regimes shape the incentives to work and get educated. Using microeconomic data for more than 100,000 European individuals, the results show that welfare regimes make a difference for wages and education. First, people- and household-based...

A seven-year randomized evaluation suggests education subsidies reduce adolescent girls’ dropout, pregnancy, and marriage but not sexually transmitted infection (STI). The government’s HIV curriculum, which stresses abstinence until marriage, does not reduce pregnancy or STI. Both programs...

Increases in human stature are seen as a key indicator of improvement in the average health of populations. The literature associates stature with a variety of socioeconomic variables, and much of the focus is on the nineteenth century and on the last 50 years. In this paper I present and...

Business training programs are a popular policy option to try to improve the performance of enterprises around the world. The last few years have seen rapid growth in the number of evaluations of these programs in developing countries. We undertake a critical review of these studies with the...

Subsidized employment is an important tool of active labour market policies to improve the chances of the unemployed to find permanent employment. Using informative individual administrative data, we investigate the effects of two different schemes of subsidized temporary employment implemented...

In this paper we study the endogenous determination of minimum wage employing a political-economic game-theoretic approach. A major objective of the paper is to clarify the crucial role of the strength of the workers' union and of political culture on the determination of the minimum wage. In...

Failure in the training market may result from credit constraints and the inability to insure against labour income uncertainty, deterring potential trainees, or labour market imperfections that create external benefits for firms. This paper constructs a model of a training market affected by...

Employment protection systems are known to generate significant distortions in firms’ hiring and firing decisions. We know much less about the impact of these regulations on workers behaviour. The goal of this Paper is to fill in this gap and in particular to assess whether the provision of...

Experience rating which is often treated as a simple adjustment cost is an original feature of the US unemployment benefit system. This Paper extensively addresses the effect of experience rating as an alternative to standard job protection. We provide a simple matching model of unemployment...