The Great Recession did not only affect European countries to a varying extent, its impact onnational labour markets and on specific socio-economic groups in those markets also variedgreatly. Institutional arrangements such as employment protection, unemployment insurancebenefits and minimum...

Recent empirical evidence has found that employment services and small-businessassistance programmes are often successful at getting the unemployed back to work. Oneimportant concern of policy makers is to decide which of these two programmes is moreeffective and for whom...

Based on a sequence of reforms in the Norwegian unemployment insurance (UI) system, weshow that activity-oriented UI regimes – i.e., regimes with a high likelihood of requiredparticipation in active labor market programs, duration limitations on unconditional UIentitlements, and high sanction...

In July 2004, the Belgian government intensified monitoring within the UnemploymentInsurance scheme. Workers claiming unemployment benefits for more than 13 months arenotified that past job-search behavior will be monitored 8 months later...

This paper investigates the role that idiosyncratic uncertainty plays in shaping social preferences over the degree of labor market flexibility, in a general equilibrium model of dynamic labor demand where the productivity of firms evolves over time as a Geometric Brownian motion...

This paper analyzes the effect of firing costs on aggregate productivity growth. For thispurpose, a model of endogenous growth through selection and imitation is developed. It isconsistent with recent evidence on firm dynamics and on the importance of reallocation forproductivity growth...

In a perfect labor market severance payments can have no real effects as they can beundone by a properly designed labor contract (Lazear 1990). We give empirical content tothis proposition by estimating the effects of EPL on entry wages and on the tenure-wageprofile in a quasi-experimental...

To assess the impact of tax-benefit policy changes on income distribution over time, wesuggest a methodology based on counterfactual simulations. We start by decomposingchanges in inequality/poverty indices into three contributions: reforms of the tax-benefitstructure (rules, rates, etc.),...

Firms select not only how many, but also which workers to hire. Yet, in standard searchmodels of the labor market, all workers have the same probability of being hired. We arguethat selective hiring crucially affects welfare analysis. Our model is isomorphic to a searchmodel under random hiring...

This paper studies optimal unemployment benefit levels and optimal proportional income taxrates over the business cycle. Previous research suggests that policy makers should makeunemployment insurance (UI) dependent on the business cycle because the UI system canbe used to smooth consumption...