In this paper, I examine the impact of immigrants on the social security system in Germany when return migration is an endogenous choice. For this purpose, I develop a dynamic stochastic model of joint return migration and saving decisions that accounts for uncertainty in future employment and...

Unemployment Accounts (UA) are mandatory individual saving accounts that can be used by governments as an alternative to the Unemployment Insurance (UI) system. I study a two tier UA-UI system where the unemployed withdraw from their unemployment account until it is exhausted and then receive...

A vast theoretical and empirical literature has focused on the effects of unemployment insurance benefits on the decisions of the recipients and how these decisions influence their labor market outcomes. Three strands of literature are discussed in this paper: (i) the impact of unemployment...

We examine how unemployment schemes and liquidity constraints affect re-employment probabilities and unemployment duration. In particular we investigate to which extent those schemes, through employment services and search requirements, can offset the expected perverse effect of benefits on...

This paper provides an analysis of recent reforms of tax-benefit systems and a preliminary assessment of their impact on financial incentives to work and on labour supply. Many Member States have introduced policies to “make work pay” and have targeted low-wage workers with the aim of...

Monitoring the job-search activities of unemployed workers is a common government intervention. Typically, a caseworker reviews the unemployed worker's employment contacts at some frequency, and applies sanctions if certain requirements are not met. I model monitoring in the optimal unemployment...

This paper studies the effect mandated severance pay in a matching model featuring wage rigidity for ongoing, but not new, matches and Pareto efficient spot renegotiation of mandated severance pay. Severance pay matters only if real wage rigidities imply inefficient separation under employment...

The aim of this paper is to study unemployment and job creation in the GCC countries. Population growth rates in all six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states are at 3% or more, with large numbers of expatriates – in some states, such as the UAE and Qatar, outnumbering locals – creating a...

In this work we study the impact on the size of the informal sector of a tax levied on formal workers, and transfers that may be distributed to both formal and informal workers alike. We build a search model that features an informal sector and we calibrate it to data from Mex- ico. We...