Voluntary public unemployment systems are limited to a handful of countries, including Finland, Sweden, and, more substantially, Denmark. A voluntary system has the positive feature of other user-cost schemes, potentially efficient targeting of services. This presumes rational behavior as well...

This paper studies skill-neutral technological changes in an economy where workers differ with respect to their abilities to acquire skills, implying increasing marginal costs of educating the work force. Our main result is that productivity slowdown and increasing wage dispersion can be...

This project employs the theory of equality of opportunity, described in Roemer’s book (Equality of Opportunity, Harvard University Press, 1998), to compute the extent to which tax-and-transfer regimes in ten countries equalize opportunities among citizens for income acquisition. Roughly...

In this paper we consider a risk averse worker who is moving back and forth between employment and unemployment; layoffs are random and beyond the worker's influcence, while the re-employment chance is directly affected by search effort. We characterize the worker's optimal savings and...

This paper studies two-stage bargaining in a simple general equilibrium model with a dual labour market. We analyse the case where agreements reached at the central level in the union sector extend beyond this sector. Conditions are identified under which firms and unions have a commonality of...

Voluntary public unemployment systems are limited to a handful of countries, including Finland, Sweden, and, more substantially, Denmark. A voluntary system has the positive feature of other user-cost schemes, potentially efficient targeting of services. This presumes rational behavior as well...

This paper studies whether a benevolent government should use workfare as part of its unemployment benefit policy. We consider a population composed of employed and unemployed workers as well as individuals who do not seek employment. Job search behavior is private information implying that...

This paper studies whether a benevolent government should use workfare as part of its unemployment benefit policy. We consider a population composed of employed and unemployed workers as well as individuals who do not seek employment. Job search behavior is private information implying that...

In this paper we consider a risk averse worker who is moving back and forth between employment and unemployment; layoffs are random and beyond the worker's influcence, while the re-employment chance is directly affected by search effort. We characterize the worker's optimal savings and...