Distortionary taxation, international business cycles and real wage: explaining some puzzling facts

In this paper, we show that fluctuations in distortive taxes can account for most puzzling features of the U.S. economy. Namely, the observed real wage rigidity, the international correlation of investment and labor inputs, and the so-called quantity puzzle (according to which cross-country correlation of outputs is higher than the one of consumptions). This is done in a two-country search and matching model with fairly standard separable preferences, extended to include a tax/benefit system.Distortive taxes, real wage rigidity, international business cycles, search, matching

Job Creation, Job Destruction and the Life Cycle

This paper originally incorporates life-cycle features into the job creation - job destruction framework. Once a finite horizon is introduced, this workhorse labor market model naturally delivers the empirically uncontroversial prediction that the employment rate of workers decreases with age due to lower hirings and higher firings of older workers. This age profile of hirings and firings is in addition found to be optimal in a competitive search equilibrium context. If search externalities are not internalized and unemployment benefits distort equilibrium, there is a room for labor market policy differentiated by age. This lastly allows us to debate the incidence of labor demand policies which have been introduced in many countries to favor the older worker employment. We show that hiring subsidies and firing costs should be decreasing with age when unemployment benefits are sufficiently high, as in the Europe. On the contrary, if unemployment benefits are low, as in the US, optimal hiring subsidies and firing taxes should be increasing with age. In this latter case, the introduction of anti-discrimination laws is a good proxy of this first best policy.Job creations and destructions, Life cycle, Older workers

Incentive Schemes to Delay Retirement and the Equilibrium Interplay with Human Capital Investment

This article introduces the role of labor demand of the elderly in the analysis of retirement decisions. We integrate both human capital formation and up-dating costs on older workers' job and explore how Social Security system affects human capital investment and retirement decisions. We show that, from the worker''s point of view, human capital investment and retirement age decisions are interdependent and positively related. On the one hand, an actuarially unfair pay-as-you-go system imposes a tax on postponed retirement which encourages early retirement, thus reducing incentives to invest in human capital. On the other hand, the pension system imposes a tax on training intensity. As a result, workers have less incentives to continue working. From the firm''s point of view, this implies an indirect tax on labor demand due to the decrease in older workers'' productivity. We then examine the pattern of the optimal policies according to flexibility versus rigidity of wages.

Welfare Cost of Fluctuations When Labor Market Search Interacts with Financial Frictions

We study the welfare costs of business cycles in a search and matching model with financial frictions à la Kiyotaki & Moore (1997). We investigate the mechanisms thatnallow the model to replicate the volatility on labor and financial markets and show that business cycle costs are sizable. We first demonstrate that the interactions between labor market and financial frictions magnify the impact of shocks via (i) a credit multiplier effect and(ii) an endogenous wage rigidity inherent to financial frictions. Secondly, in a non-linear framework, we show that the large welfare costs of fluctuations are also explained by the high average unemployment and the low job finding rates with respect to their deterministic steady-state values

Aggregate Employment,Job PolarizationAnd Inequalities

This paper develops a multi-sectorial search and matching model with endogenous occupational choice in a context of structural change. Our objective is to shed light on the way labor market institutions affect aggregate employment, job polarization and inequalities observed in the US and in European countries. We consider the cases of the US, France and Germany that are representative of alternative institutional settings, having the potential to induce divergent time-paths in the evolution of labor market outcomes during the process of technological transition. In the US and in Germany, we find employment gains from technological change and job polarization, whereas, in France, the technological change reduces aggregate employment in a context of job polarization. In the US, an half of these employment gains are due to the technological change, and the other half to the changes in the LMI, the contribution of the rise in share of skilled worker being negligible. In France, the change in LMI affects new job opportunities in manual jobs: the reallocation of routine workers towards manual jobs is obstructed for want of job creations of manual services. Hence, without technological change, the fall in French employment would have been cut by 70%. The model also predicts that, without the increase in skilled labor supply, the fall in French employment would have doubled. The improvement in educational attainment dampened the unfavorable consequences of technological change. we show that Germany transforms this structural change in employment gains, only after the labor reforms implemented after the middle of the 90s

Accounting for Labor Gaps

This study explains the impact of taxes and labor market institutions on the total hours ob- served in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. We develop a bal- anced growth model with matching frictions in the labor market distinguishing between the extensive margin and intensive margin of labor supply. We show that (i) hours are more sensitive to changes in taxes, whereas employment reacts more to shifts in labor market institutions and (ii) a substitution effect exists between employment and hours. Counterfactual experiments show that if France had experienced the same trend in labor market institutions as the United States, its employment rate would have increased by 25 percentage points, whereas its number of hours worked per employee would have reduced by 1 percentage point. If France had chosen the US’ paths of both taxes and labor market institutions, then its employment rate would have been larger by 20 percentage points and the number of hours worked by employees would have been larger by 3 percentage points than the current one, a situation observed before the 1970s