In this paper, we attempt to renew the interest in marginal employment subsidies. Such subsidies are paid only for a firm's additional employment exceeding some reference level and create larger employment stimuli at lower fiscal costs than general wage subsidies for all workers. If the hiring...

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 recuce wage costs without changing the income...

Workfare proposals concentrate on the work incentives for welfare recipients, thus focusing on the labor supply side. This paper analyzes the effects workfare has on labor demand when the labor market is unionized. As workfare reduces the number of recipients of public financial assistance, a...

This survey reviews the recent literature on the double-dividend hypothesis of environmental taxes and discusses some recent extensions of the standard model such as the distributional consequences and the importance of the non-separability assumption between consumption goods and environmental...

According to conventional wisdom internationally mobile capital should not be taxed or should be taxed at a lower rate than labour. An important underlying assumption behind this view is that there are no market imperfections, in particular that labour markets clear competitively. At least for...

This paper characterises the domestic tax systems which yield Pareto-efficient outcomes for a two-country world economy in which each country uses distortionary taxes. Such outcomes are compared with the Nash equilibria of the world economy when each country uses its domestic tax system to...

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

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...