LABOUR
By inverting Saez's model of optimal income taxation, we characterize the redistributive preferences of the Irish government between 1987 and 2005. The (marginal) social welfare function revealed by this approach is consistently comparable over time and shows great stability despite profound changes in market incomes and important fiscal reforms over the period. Results are robust to numerous checks...
Although several social, economic, and financial indicators point to a growing convergence among European countries, striking differences still emerge in the timing of leaving home for adult children. In our work, we explore the European diversity, analysing living arrangements of people 18–34 years old from 14 European countries. We use the European Community Household Panel survey and augment its...
Temporary Extra Jobs provide subsidized employment for welfare recipients and are the most frequently used welfare‐to‐work program in Germany. We evaluate the effects of participation in this program on the employment chances of immigrant welfare recipients and contrast the findings with program effects for natives. Our results reveal that Temporary Extra Jobs fail to achieve their objective. The...
This article investigates the long‐term effects of parental migration abroad on the schooling of children left behind in Albania. Although parents' migration usually benefits children economically, the lack of parental care may cause relational and psychological problems that may affect children's welfare in the long term. The phenomenon of children left behind — mainly by fathers — is considerable...
The paper argues that many choice situations involve a more complicated constraint structure than the standard linear budget constraint and consumption set. Some abstract examples are outlined and in each case some theoretical properties are derived, for example, of the comparative statics. One result of interest is to derive the direct utility choice problem, which generates quasihomothetic preferences...
In this paper we present evidence on the impact of distance to school and school availability on households' decisions concerning time allocation of primary‐age children between work, schooling, and household chores activities using data from the Ghana Living Standard Survey 1998–99. Our results indicate that the increased and eased access to school has a well‐defined impact on children's time use...
This paper analyses the return plans of irregular migrants by stressing the role of individual skills and network effects. We propose a simple two‐period life‐cycle model that we test using individual‐level data on irregular migrants in Italy and on undocumented Mexicans in the USA. Our evidence shows that highly skilled clandestine migrants are more likely to return home than migrants with low or...
The Netherlands combines a high female employment rate with a high part‐time employment rate. This is likely to be the result of (societal) preferences as the removal of institutional barriers has not led to higher working hours. We investigate the development of working hours over successive generations of women using the Dutch Labour Force Survey 1992–2005. We find evidence of a strictly increasing...
This paper focuses on the effects of Dutch long‐term care and labour market policies on women's labour market participation and informal caregiving decisions. Labour market participation and informal caregiving are estimated jointly through a multivariate dynamic binary probit on European Community Household Panel data. Under Dutch policy, informal care decisions appear to be independent of household...
An important feature of Scandinavian welfare states is the transfer of resources to families with children. Long parental leave and provision of high‐quality subsidized day care are important policies in this regard. This paper evaluates the impact of a recent Norwegian family policy reform on the labour supply of native and immigrant women in Norway. The reform provides cash benefits to families...
This paper investigates the effects of children on women's wages in the Finnish private sector. The paper finds evidence of the motherhood wage penalty, the penalty varying with the length of the child‐related career break. Mothers staying at home no longer than for 2 years face considerably smaller penalties than mothers spending longer periods at home. The negative wage effects of children decrease,...
The paper analyses the welfare effects of union bargaining (de)centralization in a dual labour market with a unionized and a competitive sector. We show that social welfare depends on both the structure of the union's objective function and the elasticities of labour demand in both sectors. The welfare‐maximizing employment allocation can be obtained under a high degree of centralization if the union...
We present a dynamic policy simulation analysing what would have happened to wages, employment, and total hours had the federal minimum wage increased in September 1998, a year after the last actual increase in our data. Prior work suggests that employment responses take 6 years to play out. Using a time‐series model for 23 low‐wage industries, we find a positive response of average wages over 54...
By easing restrictions on the use of short‐term contracts, the 30/2003 act represents contemporaneously the more extensive and the more radical policy aimed at introducing flexibility in the Italian labour market. By virtue of a difference‐in‐differences estimator, the paper provides an estimate of the impact of the 30/2003 reform on the wage gap across fixed‐term and long‐term employees. It will...
Using data from a sample of 1,099 workers, this paper investigates the determinants of employment and wages for workers in the United Arab Emirates. The paper further examines the wage distribution and the decomposition of the wage gap between the public and the private sectors. Results of the study are consistent with the dual labour market theory and indicate that the labour market in the United...
This paper examines how a minimum wage, viewed as an incentive to trainers, would affect the informal help provided through on‐the‐job training. In the work environment, experienced employees play a significant role in training new employees. However, the more help they provide to trainees, the less likely that the trainers themselves will be promoted. This is the trainer's dilemma: help trainees...
This study contributes to the literature on how personality is rewarded in the labour market by examining the relationship between personality and labour market income. Our results suggest that adulthood extraversion is positively associated with income when education, work experience, and unemployment history, measured prospectively from longitudinal data, are controlled for. In addition, childhood...
This paper presents a simple model that explains how the likelihood of job changes and their complexity changes over a worker's career, and the empirical work presented here uses the life cycle patterns of mobility and their complexity to infer the relative importance of firm‐specific versus career‐specific concerns as determinants of mobility decisions. The estimates of the model indicate that the...
The paper empirically tests the relationship between underground labour and schooling achievement for Italy, a country ranking badly in both respects when compared with other high‐income economies, with a marked duality between North and South. In order to identify underground workers, we exploit the information on individuals' social security positions available from the Bank of Italy's Survey on...