This paper shows that outsourcing of parts of workforce in unionized firms leads to wage moderation both in the case of strategic and flexible outsourcing and as long as the share of the outsourced workforce is not too large, this wage-moderation effect on domestic employment outweighs the...

This paper shows that a small open economy should levy positive source-based taxes on capital income to fight involuntary unemployment and increase welfare. A revenue-neutral tax reform which increases the capital tax rate and reduces the labour tax rate will induce firms to substitute labour...

Using the Nash bargaining approach to wage negotiations this paper shows that conventional wisdom, according to which the total tax wedge is the sum of wage and payroll taxes, is valid for equal tax bases, e.g., when the tax exemption takes the form of a tax credit. However, the equivalence...

This paper studies a revenue-neutral green tax reform that substitutes energy for wage taxes in an open economy with unemployment. As long as the labour tax rate exceeds the energy tax rate, such a reform will increase employment, reduce the domestic firms’ unit cost of production and hence...

When consumers choose between clean and dirty goods and the labour market clears, a green tax reform may not bring about a double dividend in the sense of increasing environmental quality and increasing employment. However, when firms choose between clean and dirty factors of production, and...

In this paper, we study the impact of tax policy on wage negotiations, workers’ effort, and employment when effort is only imperfectly observable. We show that the different wage-setting motives – rent sharing and effort incentives – reinforce the effects of partial tax policy measures but...

Within an efficiency-wage framework, we study the effects of two revenue-neutral tax reforms that change the progressivity of the labor tax system. A revenue-neutral increase in both the wage tax and the tax exemption and a revenue-neutral change in the composition of labor taxation towards the...

We study the impact of tax policy on wage negotiations, workers’ effort, employment, output and welfare when workers’ effort is only imperfectly observable. We show that the different wage-setting motives – rent sharing and effort incentives – reinforce the effects of partial tax policy...

According to the existing literature, capital taxes should not be imposed in the presence of optimal profit taxation in either unionised or competitive labour markets. We show that this conclusion does not hold for an economy with both competitive and unionised sectors, where the competitive...