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 worker effort. The goal of this paper is to fill in this gap and in particular to assess whether the provision of...

Using a comprehensive and newly organized dataset the present article shows that the human capital content of emigrants from Italy significantly increased during the 1990 s . This is even more dramatically the case if we consider emigrating college graduates, whose share relative to total...

The age at which children leave the parental home differs considerably across countries. We present a theoretical model predicting that higher job security of parents and lower job security of children may delay emancipation. We then provide aggregate evidence which supports this hypothesis for...

In this paper we analyze the relationship between unemployment and consumption. We study this relationship with panel data on households in five countries: Spain and Italy (the South), and Germany, Britain, and the US (the North). Our empirical results indicate that an increase in the duration...

Many countries subsidize low-income employments or small jobs. These subsidies and their phasing out can generate labor market frictions and distort incentives. The German Minijob program subsidizes low-income jobs. It generates a 'Minijob trap' with substantial bunching along the earnings...

This paper investigates whether incentives generated by public policies contribute to motherhood penalties. Specifically, we study the consequences of subsidized small jobs, the German Minijobs, which are frequently taken up by first-time mothers upon labor market return. Using a combination of...

We study state dependence in welfare receipt and investigate whether welfare transitions changed after a welfare reform. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we apply dynamic multinomial logit estimators and find that state dependence in welfare receipt is not a central feature of...

We use census data on 26 Swiss cantons to determine the association of educational institutions with the intergenerational transmission of education. We test whether education transmission is higher when children enter kindergarten and school earlier and when tracking occurs at a later age. In...

This paper studies the association between the unemployment experience of fathers and their sons. Based on German survey data that cover the last decades we find significant positive correlations. Using instrumental variables estimation and the Gottschalk (1996) method we investigate to what...