Fairness Spillovers – The Case of Taxation

It is standardly assumed that individuals react to perceived unfairness or norm violations in precisely the same area or relationship where the original offense has occurred. However, grievances over being exposed to injustice may have even broader consequences and also spill over to other contexts, causing non-compliant behavior there. We present evidence that such 'fairness spillovers' can incur large economic costs: A belief that there is unfairness in taxation in the sense that the rich don't pay enough taxes is associated with a twenty percent higher level of paid absenteeism from work

Employment stability and mobility: empirical findings and policy conclusions

The objective of this paper is to present a short survey of our new research results to mobility and stability of employment on a micro level. This area of conflict is analyzed from an individual and a firm's perspective, taking institutional issues into account. More than previous studies, we investigate interactions between individual and firm side issues. The results can be assigned to four subsections. First, individual, firm and macroeconomic determinants of employment stability are identified. Second, the relevance of wages and job satisfaction for job changes is investigated. In addition to other findings, the results show for Germany that high job stability and high wages go hand in hand. There exist also unobserved determinants which operate as compensating wage differentials. Third, the impact of institutions on job mobility is analysed. The outcome demonstrates that employment in firms with a collective agreement is more stable than in other firms, while company level pacts are not very successful in stabilizing employment at least in the medium term. Fourth, the effects of wage subsidies on wages and employment duration are investigated. The analysis shows that subsidised workers stay significantly longer at their first employer than similar unsubsidised workers, while entry wages do not differ significantly between both groups

Downward nominal wage rigidity in Europe: an analysis of European micro data from the ECHP 1994–2001

Downward nominal wage rigidity, Wage stickiness, European community household panel, ECHP, Histogram-location approach, European union, Euro area, J30, E24,

Job satisfaction, job match quality and labour supply decisions

This paper introduces job satisfaction into neoclassical theory of labour supply. This simple integration produces non-trivial results: job satisfaction is able to reduce disutility of labour, thus increasing labour supply; also, if job satisfaction is very high, labour could generate utility, while leisure could provide disutility. In this paper, job satisfaction, and thus job match quality, is specified in terms of appropriate collocation of the worker in the workplace; in short, the higher the matching between the investment in education and the task assigned in the workplace, the higher the job satisfaction. An empirical analysis substantiates the two main predictions of this paper, namely the key role of job satisfaction in time allocation and labour supply decisions and the plausibility of our view about job satisfaction