Over the previous two decades, many OECD countries have lowered the degree of progressivity in their tax structures. In this paper, I investigate labour tax progression in a world characterised by a segmented labour market where the higher-paying jobs are rationed due to (i) oligopolistic market...

This paper presents a case study on reforming a very dysfunctional labor market with a deep insider-outsider divide, namely the Spanish case. We show how a dual market, with permanent and temporary employees, makes real reform much harder, and leads to purely marginal changes that do not alter...

This paper presents a case study on reforming a very dysfunctional labor market with a deep insider-outsider divide, namely the Spanish case. We show how a dual market, with permanent and temporary employees makes real reform much harder, and leads to purely marginal changes that do not alter...

This paper presents a case study on reforming a very dysfunctional labor market with a deep insider-outsider divide, namely the Spanish case. We show how a dual market, with permanent and temporary employees makes real reform much harder, and leads to purely marginal changes that do not alter...

We analyze voting in private and public committees whose members care about the selected decision and the rewards which outsiders pay for representing their interests. If the agenda is binary or outsiders are symmetric then a private committee reaches decisions which better serve organizational...

"Transparency is usually thought to reduce favoritism and corruption by facilitating monitoring by outsiders, but there is concern it can have the perverse effect of facilitating collusion by insiders. In response to vote trading scandals in the 1998 and 2002 Olympics, the International Skating...

In this paper we apply standard cartel theory to identify the major institutional stabilizers of Germany's area tariff system of collective bargaining between a single industry union and the industry's employers association. Our cartel analysis allows us to demonstrate that recent labor policy...

One of the predictions of the insider-outsider theory is that wages will be higher in sectors (firms) with high labor adjustment costs/high turnover costs. This prediction is tested empirically in this study, using an insider-outsider model and a longitudinal panel of large firms in Portugal....

We study the political economy of labour market policies. First, it is shown that tax and redistributive considerations lead inside workers to prefer spending on active labour market programmes to passive spending, e.g., on unemployment benefits. We also show that greater active spending may be...

"We document the presence of a trade-off between unemployment benefits (UB) and employment protection legislation (EPL) in the provision of insurance against labor market risk. Different countries' locations along this trade-off represent stable, hard to modify, politico-economic equilibria. We...

This paper considers whether labour market rigidities lead to more underground economic activities. This is suggested by aggregate cross-country data which show that underground economic activities are more strongly correlated with a commonly used index of employment protection than with...