Population ageing poses stark dilemmas for labour markets, social protection systems and cultural norms. It will put strong downward pressure on labour supply, leading to falling real incomes and huge financial pressures on social protection systems unless there is an offsetting increase in...

Population ageing poses stark dilemmas for labour markets, social protection systems and cultural norms. It will put strong downward pressure on labour supply, leading to falling real incomes and huge financial pressures on social protection systems unless there is an offsetting increase in...

The generous Danish welfare state relies on a high degree of labour force participation both for financing and in order to ensure social cohesion. This underlines the need for getting work incentives right and improve the employability of vulnerable groups of workers, in particular migrants....

This paper considers the role of flexicurity when jobs must be reallocated from a declining, traditional sector to a skill intensive expanding sector. Workers initially decide whether to acquire qualifications for skill-intensive tasks or to accept a less demanding traditional job. Unemployment...

In the past 25 years a vast number of Italian workers have become jobless for long periods of time, often dropping out of the labor market and becoming long-term inactives for the rest of their life. This process has long roots in the past and has been fuelled by Italy's poor economic...

There is a growing body of evidence on the efficacy of Short-Time Compensation (STC), a subsidy to promote worksharing in a recession, in achieving its intended goal of curtailing layoffs and preventing a sharp rise in unemployment. However, very little is known about the consequences of STC for...

The likely impact of the EMU on the variability and level of employment is analyzed. The major conclusions are as follows: (i) Although an inflation-target regime will constrain monetary policy of a non-participant in the EMU, it still leaves considerable scope for exchange-rate changes in the...

Theoretical work on minimum wage policy emphasizes labor market dynamics, but the resulting implications for worker mobility remain largely untested. We show that in the teenage labor market minimum wages reduce worker flows and increase job stability. Furthermore, we find that the employment...

Targeted employment subsidy programs are commonly employed by governments. This study examines one such initiative that rebated unemployment insurance premi- ums to employers with net increases in insurable earnings for youth aged 18 to 24. In each of two datasets, statistically and economically...

The purpose of this chapter is twofold. First, it reviews the model of search and matching equilibrium and derives the properties of employment and unemployment equilibrium. Second, it applies the model to the study of employment fluctuations and to the explanation of differences in unemployment...