Mit der Bürgerarbeit hat die Bundesagentur für Arbeit scheinbar die Erfolgsformel gegen die Arbeitslosigkeit entdeckt: Langzeitarbeitslose finden wieder geregelte Arbeit, der Fiskus wird nicht belastet und Firmen müssen keine Konkurrenz befürchten, da nur marktferne Tätigkeiten in der...

The "conservative central banker" has come under attack recently. Explicitly modeling the interaction of a trade union with monetary policy, it has been argued that the standard solution to the inflationary bias in monetary policy might actually be welfare reducing if the trade union has an...

This paper develops a model of a small open economy that produces an export good with domestic labour and imported energy and is stuck in an unemployment situation resulting from an excessive fixed net-of-tax wage rate. We study a revenue-neutral green tax reform that substitutes energy for wage...

This paper investigates the effects of labor market integration, in the form of worker mobility, in a model with long-term labor contracts that lead to wage rigidities and unemployment. Increased mobility leads to more flexible labor market institutions in which firms can more easily vary the...

Many countries suffer from persistently high unemployment rates. The scope for labour market reforms is often limited to measures that hurt neither shareholders nor workers. This paper develops a policy proposal, which allows the government to reduce wage costs without changing the income...

We study the subsidization of extra jobs in a general equilibrium framework. While the previous literature focuses on symmetric marginal employment subsidies where firms are rewarded when they increase employment but punished when they reduce their workforce, we consider an asymmetric scheme...

The double-dividend hypothesisclaims that green taxes will both improve the environment andreduce the distortions of existing taxes. According to the earlierliterature on the double dividend the tax rate for pollutinggoods should be higher than the Pigovian tax which fully internalizesthe...

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...