Using a competitive two-country two-commodity monetary model with optimizing agents in which persistent unemployment arises, this paper examines the effects of trade restrictions on consumption and employment in the two countries. When facing unemployment, a country tends to impose an import restriction so that domestic firms will increase production and raise employment. However, this policy i...

Using a competitive two-country two-commodity monetary model with optimizing agents in which persistent unemployment arises, this paper examines the effects of trade restrictions on consumption and employment in the two countries. When facing unemployment, a country tends to impose an import restriction so that domestic firms will increase production and raise employment. However, this policy i...

Using estimates of earnings functions in Ghana, this paper examines patterns of labor market segmentation with regard to formal and informal employment. Persistent earnings differentials are used as indicators of limited mobility across segments of the employed labor force. We find evidence of labor market segmentation between formal and informal employment and between different categories of i...

Redundancy payments for collective dismissals are incorporated into a Shapiro-Stiglitz model of efficiency wages. It is shown that a fixed payment will lower wages, leave employment and welfare unaffected if there are no wage-dependent taxes, no additional firing costs and if unemployment benefits are not altered by redundancy payments. If payroll taxes exceed firing costs and unemployment bene...

How Do Layoff Costs Affect Employment? General equilibrium analyses of layoff costs have had mixed messages on the implications for employment. This paper brings out the economic forces at work and explains the disparate results. Specifically, we show that positive employment effects of layoff costs come through reducing labor reallocation, whereas negative effects come through reducing the pri...

The world’s biggest and arguably most aggressive form of employment based affirmative action policy for minorities exists in India. This paper exploits the institutional features of federally mandated employment quota policy to examine its effect on labor market outcomes of two distinct minority groups. My main finding is that a 1-percent increase in employment quota significantly increases the...

How Do Layoff Costs Affect Employment? General equilibrium analyses of layoff costs have had mixed messages on the implications for employment. This paper brings out the economic forces at work and explains the disparate results. Specifically, we show that positive employment effects of layoff costs come through reducing labor reallocation, whereas negative effects come through reducing the pri...

This paper examines the impact of US income and payroll taxes on the decision of wage-and-salary employees to become self-employed. I exploit variations in the tax treatment of wage and self-employment income using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Results show that differential taxation has significant effects on the probability of making a transition into self-employment. Reducing an indivi...

In this paper we analyze the relationship between strictness of employment protection and efficiency of bankruptcy law. We argue that country’s legal tradition provides the appropriate institutional proxy to explain the nature of such relationship. We find that for civil law countries where bankruptcy procedures are more inefficient a stricter employment protection policy is enforced. For commo...

This paper characterizes the optimal redistributive tax schedule in a matching unemployment framework where (voluntary) nonparticipation and (involuntary) unemployment are endogenous. The optimal employment tax rate is given by an inverse employment elasticity rule. This rule depends on the global response of the employment rate, which depends not only on the participation (labor supply) respon...