Public Profit Sharing

Many countries suffer from persistently high unemployment rates. The scope for labour market reforms is often limited to measures that hurt neither shareholders nor workers. This paper develops a policy proposal, which allows the government to reduce wage costs without changing the income positions as determined in the process of wage negotiations. It is shown that the introduction of public profit sharing, i.e. substituting profit share for social security contributions, can boost employment both in the short run and the long run. Calibrating the model and comparing the results with recent empirical findings about the impact of labour taxation confirm the theoretical findings.Public profit sharing, trade unions, unemployment, labour market reform

Climate policy: choosing the right instrument to reap an additional employment dividend

Climate protection should use environmental policy instruments that raise revenues, which can be used, for instance, to cut labour taxes to alleviate unemployment in economies suffering from high and persistent unemployment. This paper elaborates the possibilities of an employment dividend of climate policies and shows the potential importance of such a second dividend for a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis of climate policy. It is argued that national attempts to reap such a double dividend may be bound to fail if resource suppliers can respond in a way that leads to a large-scale international reallocation of environmental rents. Only a internationally coordinated uniform base tax on CO2 that complements already existing emission trading systems could keep revenues from climate policy in those countries bearing the cost of fighting global warming and thus leave them with the option on a second dividend. --Climate policy,double-dividend hypothesis,employment dividend,supplier responses

Workfare and Trade Unions: Labor Market Repercussions of Welfare Reform

Workfare proposals concentrate on the work incentives for welfare recipients, thus focusing on the labor supply side. This paper analyzes the effects workfare has on labor demand when the labor market is unionized. As workfare reduces the number of recipients of public financial assistance, a workfare regime, as opposed to a welfare system, weakens the outside option of trade unions in wage negotiations. It is shown that revenue-neutral workfare enforcement where any surpluses are rebated by i) reducing the income tax or ii) increasing a workers’ tax credit, unambiguously decreases gross wage rates and thus decreases equilibrium unemployment. Though trade union members may be worse off as a consequence of workfare enforcement, their compensation for the wage reduction is highest when the revenue-neutral rebate of savings is used to increase worker-specific tax credits.workfare, welfare reform, trade unions, involuntary unemployment

Not optimal, but Effective: the Multi-Mode Ticket for Reducing Urban Traffic Congestion in Medium-Sized Towns

Stadtverkehr, Stadtverkehrspolitik, Öffentlicher Personennahverkehr, Verkehrsstau, Mittelstadt, Urban transport, Urban transport policy, Public Transport, Traffic jam, Medium-size city

The Double Dividend Hypothesis of Environmental Taxes: A Survey

This survey reviews the recent literature on the double-dividend hypothesis of environmental taxes and discusses some recent extensions of the standard model such as the distributional consequences and the importance of the non-separability assumption between consumption goods and environmental quality for the optimal design of environmental policies. Furthermore, the paper analyses alternative concepts of a double dividend by looking at the employment dividend in countries that suffer from involuntary unemployment, and rent-extracting dividends that resource-consuming countries can reap at the cost of resource-owning countries.

The Double Dividend Hypothesis of Environmental Taxes: A Survey

This survey reviews the recent literature on the double-dividend hypothesis of environmental taxes and discusses some extensions of the standard model such as the distributional consequences and the importance of the non-separability assumption between consumption goods and environmental quality for the optimal design of environmental policies. Turning to a model with imperfect labour markets we then show under which circumstances environmental taxes on polluting inputs in production and on polluting consumption goods can reap a second dividend in the form of an employment dividend and discuss the welfare implications. Finally, we turn to international aspects of environmental taxation. When environmental problems are tied to the use of exhaustible resources, resource-consuming countries can appropriate resource rents at the cost of resource-owning countries by levying environmental taxes strategically.Environmental taxation, Double-dividend hypothesis, Full-employment models, Unemployment models, International coordination

Workfare in Germany and the Problem of Vertical Fiscal Externalities

Social assistance to the poor is increasingly subject to compulsory work requirements in Germany. Municipalities have started to offer temporary employment in their job-creation companies to claimants who are able to work. These claimants earn wages and social insurance contributions if they accept the offer, but lose social assistance if they reject it. Further savings to local funds arise from the fact that when a worker's temporary employment ends, he or she is entitled to federal unemployment benefits which involve no costs for the municipality. The paper analyses this vertical fiscal externality and shows that in the long run, municipalities tend to employ a suboptimal number of welfare recipients in their companies.Social assistance, unemployment insurance, fiscal federalism

Asymmetric Information Renders Minimum Wages Less Harmful

We show that a minimum wage introduced in the presence of asymmetric information about worker productivities will lead to lower unemployment levels than predicted by the standard labour market model with heterogeneous labour and symmetric information.minimum wages, unemployment, asymmetric information, labour market regulation

Distortionary Domestic Taxation and Pareto-Efficient International Trade

This paper characterises the domestic tax systems which yield Pareto-efficient outcomes for a two-country world economy in which each country uses distortionary taxes. Such outcomes are compared with the Nash equilibria of the world economy when each country uses its domestic tax system to influence ist terms of trade. In such circumstances, the implementation of domestic tax systems which achieve a globally Pareto-efficient outcome as a Nash equilibrium will be very difficult, for two main reasons: the ability of countries to use tax policy with respect to non-traded goods for protection, and the fact that Pareto-efficient tax structures depend on countries‘ distributional judgements, which are hard to measure objectively.

Subsidizing Extra Jobs: Promoting Employment by Taming the Unions

We study the subsidization of extra jobs in a general equilibrium framework. While the previous literature focuses on symmetric marginal employment subsidies where firms are rewarded when they increase employment but punished when they reduce their workforce, we consider an asymmetric scheme that only rewards employment expansion. This changes the incidence substantially. In the asymmetric case without punishment, it becomes less costly for firms to lay off a substantial fraction of their workforce when trade unions raise wages. This tames the unions, which causes wage moderation and raises aggregate employment and welfare. For moderate subsidy rates, all unions prefer to restrain their wage claims. At sufficiently high subsidy rates, labor market conditions improve so much that some unions enforce higher wages and let their firms shrink. This displacement of firms might have a negative impact on employment and welfare.unemployment, marginal employment subsidies, general equilibrium