Firms without paid employees account for up to 80% of all firms, but only a small minority ever hires. This paper investigates the relationship between labour costs and the decision to hire a first employee and become an employer. Leveraging a unique policy in Belgium that permanently reduced...

Hiring subsidies are widely used to create (stable) employment for the long-term unemployed. This paper exploits the abolition of a hiring subsidy targeted at long-term unemployed jobseekers over 45 years of age in Belgium to evaluate its effectiveness in the short and medium run. Based on a...

Shift work is a widespread but understudied phenomenon. This paper examines one specific aspect of shift work: the shift premium. To this end, we included a discrete choice experiment in an online survey targeted at night and shift workers. Respondents chose between a standard 9 am - 5 pm job...

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...

Providing income support to unemployed education-leavers reduces the returns to investments in education because it makes the consequences of unemployment less severe. We evaluate a two-part policy reform in Belgium to study whether conditioning the prospective entitlement to unemployment...

In 2015, 15% of all children in China were left behind in the countryside because at least one of their parents migrated to a city. We implement an event study analysis between 2010 and 2018 on five waves of the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) to investigate the dynamic effects of parental...

This article decomposes the observed gaps in educational attainment and school-to-work transitions between grandchildren of natives and immigrants in Belgium into (i) differences in observed family endowments and (ii) a residual pure ethnic gap. It innovates by explicitly taking delays in...

This paper develops a partial equilibrium job search model to study the behavioral and welfare implications of an Unemployment Insurance (UI) scheme in which job search requirements are imposed on UI recipients with hyperbolic preferences. We show that, if the search requirements are well...

We study the impact of graduating in a recession in Flanders (Belgium), i.e. in a rigid labor market. In the presence of a high minimum wage, a typical recession hardly influences the hourly wage of low educated men, but reduces working time and earnings by about 4.5% up to twelve years after...

In several OECD countries age-targeted wage subsidies have been introduced to increase the employment of older workers, but evidence on their effectiveness is scarce. This paper examines the effects of a permanent wage cost subsidy in Belgium on the employment rate, working time and hourly wage....