Documents CESifo 326 results

"We examine the redistributive impact of working time regulations in an economy with unequal lifetimes. It is shown that uniform working time reductions, when uncompensated (i.e. constant hourly wage), can reduce inequalities in realized lifetime well-being between short-lived and long-lived persons with respect to the laissez-faire, but at the cost of making the short-lived worse off. When compensated (i.e. constant labour earnings), uniform working time reductions make the short-lived better off, but at the cost of raising inequalities. Then, we characterize the ex post egalitarian optimum, where the realized lifetime well-being of the worst off is maximized, and show that this social optimum involves an increasing age profile in terms of worked hours. We examine the decentralization of that social optimum, and we provide a second-best egalitarian argument for age-dependent working time regulation, which can make the short-lived better off and reduce inequalities in realized lifetime well-being."

"This paper studies the unemployment accelerator, a mechanism where workers directly affect the firms' financial conditions, and, in turn, firms' financial conditions feedback again to the real economy. The unemployment accelerator builds on two key assumptions: search frictions in the labor market and firms' default risk. The former assumption implies a positive relation between the firm's value and its number of workers; the latter assumption entails a tight connection between the value of the workers and the firm's incentives to default. We develop and estimate a model with these two frictions together with firm-level heterogeneity; and show the model matches firm-level statistics as well as business cycle fluctuations in labor and financial markets. We provide compelling micro-evidence of the unemployment accelerator: a 10% increase in a firm's number of workers is associated with a 4% increase in its market value and a 6% decline in its probability of default. We show that our model can account for these facts, and that the two key assumptions we make are essential for this."

"In this paper I explore a model where citizens of a country vulnerable to damages from climate change may migrate to a second country, from which a steady stream of greenhouse gases occur. If this migration imposes costs on the emitting country, then migration induces a sort of pseudo carbon tax.via political economic forces. This pseudo tax creates an incentive for the country receiving the flow of immigrants to lower its emissions, offering an offset to the costs incurred as a result of climate change. I show that the long run carbon stock, and the entire time path of production (and hence emissions), is smaller in the presence of migration. I discuss various comparative dynamics, for both the path of production and the long run atmospheric carbon stock."

"We set up a general equilibrium model, in which offshoring to a low-wage country can lead to job polarisation in the high-wage country. Job polarisation is the result of a reallocation of labour across firms that differ in productivity and pay wages that are positively linked to their profits by a rent-sharing mechanism. Offshoring involves fixed and task-specific variable costs, and as a consequence it is chosen only by the most productive firms, and only for those tasks with the lowest variable offshoring costs. A reduction in those variable costs increases offshoring at the intensive and at the extensive margin, with domestic employment shifted from the newly offshoring firms in the middle of the productivity distribution to firms at the tails of this distribution, paying either very low or very high wages. We also study how the reallocation of labour across firms affects economy-wide unemployment. Offshoring reduces unemployment when it is confined to high-productivity firms, while this outcome is not guaranteed when offshoring is also chosen by low-productivity firms."

"Crowdfunding provides innovation in enabling entrepreneurs to contract with consumers before investment. Under aggregate demand uncertainty, this improves screening for valuable projects. Entrepreneurial moral hazard and private cost information threatens this benefit. Despite these threats, popular crowdfunding schemes are able to implement optimal screening mechanisms. Crowdfunding's after-markets enable consumers to actively implement deferred payments and thereby optimally manage the entrepreneur's incentives. Efficiency is sustainable only if expected returns exceed an agency cost associated with the entrepreneurial incentive problems. By reducing demand uncertainty, crowdfunding promotes welfare and complements traditional entrepreneurial financing which focuses on controlling moral hazard."

"We present the results from a natural experiment in which single mothers on welfare were stimulated to find a job. Two policy instruments were introduced: an earnings disregard and job creation. The experiment was performed at the level of municipalities in The Netherlands, a country with relatively high benefits and low incentives for single mothers to leave welfare for work. In our analysis, we make a distinction between native and immigrant welfare recipients. For immigrant single mothers and some groups of native single mothers we find a positive employment effect of an earnings disregard. Job creation in addition to the earnings disregard increased working hours for some groups of single mothers. Although the outflow from welfare was not affected, welfare expenditures were reduced."

"This paper investigates the link between variation in the supply of workers who participate in specific types of active labour market policies (ALMPs) and firm performance using a new exceptionally informative German employer-employee data base. For identification we exploit that German local employment agencies (LEAs) have a high degree of autonomy in determining their own mix of ALMPs and that firms' hiring regions overlap only imperfectly with the areas of responsibility of the LEAs. Our results indicate that in general firms do not benefit from ALMPs and in some cases may even be harmed by certain programs, in particular by subsidized employment and longer training programs. These findings complement the negative assessment of the cost-effectiveness of ALMPs from the empirical literature on the effects for participants."

"This paper examines empirically the interaction between immigration and host country economic conditions. We employ panel VAR techniques to use a large annual dataset on 22 OECD countries over the period 1987-2009. The VAR approach allows to addresses the endogeneity problem by allowing the endogenous interaction between the variables in the system. Our results provide evidence of migration contribution to host economic prosperity (positive impact on GDP per capita and negative impact on aggregate unemployment, native- and foreign-born unemployment rates). We also find that migration is influenced by host economic conditions (migration responds positively to host GDP per capita and negatively to host total unemployment rate)."

"This article decomposes the observed gaps in educational attainment and school-to-work transitions between grandchildren of natives and immigrants in Belgium into (i) differences in observed family endowments and (ii) a residual “pure ethnic gap”. It innovates by explicitly taking delays in educational attainment into account, by identifying the moments at which the pure ethnic gaps arise, by disentangling the decision to continue schooling at the end of a school year from the achievement within a particular grade, and by integrating the language spoken at home among observed family endowments. The pure ethnic gap in educational attainment is found to be small if delays are neglected, but substantial if not and for school-to-work transitions. It is shown that more than 20% of the pure ethnic gap in graduating from secondary school without delay originates in tenth grade. Language usage explains only part of the gap in school-to-work transitions for low educated."