Search results

Short-time work compensation aims at reducing lay-offs by allowing employers to temporarily reduce hours worked while compensating workers for the induced loss of income. These programs are now widespread in the OECD countries, notably following the 2008-2009 crisis. This paper discusses the efficiency of this type of policy and investigates its impact on unemployment and employment. There is some evidence that short-time compensation programs stabilize permanent employment and reduce unemployment during downturns. All in all, it seems that short-time work programs used in the recent downturn had significant beneficial effects. This suggests that countries which do not have short-time compensation programs could benefit from their introduction. But short-time compensation programs can also induce inefficient reductions in working hours and reduce the prospects of outsiders if used too intensively. Thus, the design of short-time compensation programs should include an experience-rating component.

This paper develops a new method to uncover the causal effect of trust on economic growth by focusing on the inherited component of trust and its time variation. We show that inherited trust of descendants of US immigrants is significantly influenced by the country of origin and the timing of arrival of their forebears. We thus use the inherited trust of descendants of US immigrants as a time-varying measure of inherited trust in their country of origin. This strategy allows to identify the sizeable causal impact of inherited trust on worldwide growth during the twentieth century by controlling for country fixed effects. (JEL N11, N12, N31, N32, O47, Z13)

Analyse des conditions politiques et économiques pour implémenter des réformes en France

Analyse des conditions politiques et économiques pour implémenter des réformes en France

Analyse des conditions politiques et économiques pour implémenter des réformes en France

Analyse des conditions politiques et économiques pour implémenter des réformes en France

Analyse des conditions politiques et économiques pour implémenter des réformes en France

Résumé En France, la législation du licenciement économique permet aux entreprises de licencier pour sauvegarder leur compétitivité mais pas pour l'améliorer. En d'autres termes, les entreprises ne peuvent licencier pour augmenter leurs profits. Nous montrons que la législation française constitue, de ce point de vue, une exception au regard de ses partenaires de l'Union européenne. Nous présentons ensuite un modèle dans lequel les entreprises peuvent licencier soit pour accroître leurs profits, soit parce que les emplois sont non rentables. Ce modèle nous permet de montrer qu'une politique optimale consiste à imposer des coûts de licenciements identiques pour les deux types de licenciements. Ce résultat suggère que la voie particulière suivie par la France depuis le début des années 1990 en matière de législation du licenciement économique mériterait d'être reconsidérée.

We analyze optimal taxation in an economy with monopsonistic labor markets. The individuals, whose only decisions are whether to work, or not, have heterogeneous productivities and opportunity costs of work. Given its preferences for redistribution, the government, which does not observe the opportunity costs of work, chooses a tax scheme implementing the second best allocation. We compare the optima in the competitive and monopsonistic environments. We find that the government can always implement the second best allocation of the competitive economy in the monopsonistic environment. The optimal tax schedule comprises employment subsidies financed by taxes on profits. In this setup, there is no room for a minimum wage.

This paper shows that the stringency of employment protection in Mediterranean countries can be partly explained by cultural values embedded in religion. Both the security provided by this legislation and its redistributive effects in favour of the male breadwinner insiders fit into the framework of Mediterranean religions. First, international individual surveys allow us to document that Catholics and Muslims are more likely to agree with traditional gender division of work than Protestants and the non-religious. Second, we develop a political economy model predicting that employment protection should be more stringent in countries where there is a larger share of insiders supportive of traditional family values. We then show that this prediction is supported by empirical evidence on OECD countries over the period 1970–99.