Volume 11 (2021): Issue 1 (January 2021)

Many European countries have implemented policies to revive their domestic service sectors. A common goal of these reforms has been to create employment for disadvantaged groups on the domestic labor market. I evaluate a Swedish policy where domestic service firms receive a 50% tax deduction on labor costs. Detailed data from tax records identify all formal workers and owners of firms that receive deductions. I describe the composition of workers and owners in these firms with respect to three groups targeted by Swedish policymakers: refugees, people with low education, and people who enter the workforce from long-term unemployment. I find that the shares of refugees and long-term unemployed in the subsidized sector barely exceed the shares in the full private labor force, and fall far below the shares in industrial sectors with a predominance of elementary jobs. The share of people with low education is higher than in the full private sector and on par with other low-skilled sectors. I conclude that the tax subsidy largely failed to improve employment opportunities among the target groups. An extended analysis suggests that labor immigration from other EU countries may be a partial explanation for this. EU immigrants operate half of all subsidized firms in Sweden's largest cities and nearly exclusively employ other EU immigrants.

Population aging in Europe calls for an overall rise in the age of retirement. However, most observers agree that the latter should be differentiated to account for different individuals’ heterogeneous health when they grow older. This paper explores the relevance of this idea using the European Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) panel data. It first quantifies the health gradient across and within each of the European countries across sociodemographic groups (i.e., Gender × Education) at typical retirement age. It then estimates the degree of retirement age differentiation that would be needed to equalize expected health at the moment of retirement. Results point at the need for a very high degree of differentiation to equalize expected health, both across and within, European countries. But the paper also shows that systematic retirement age differentiation would fail to match a significant portion of the full distribution of health status. In a world synonymous with systematic health-based retirement age differentiation, there would still be a lot of what health economists call F-mistakes ([F]ailure of treatment, i.e., no retirement for people in poor health) and E-mistakes ([E]xcessive treatment, i.e., people in good health going for retirement).

While unemployment rates in Europe declined after the global financial crisis until 2018/2019, the incidence of long-term unemployment, the share of people who have been unemployed for >1 year to the total unemployed, remained high. Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic could aggravate the long-term unemployment. This paper explores the factors associated with long-term unemployment in European countries using a panel of 25 European countries over the period 2000–2018. We find that skill mismatches, labor market matching efficiency, and labor market policies are associated with the incidence of long-term unemployment. Among the different types of active labor market policies, training and startup incentives are found to be effective in reducing long-term unemployment.

Although a public long-term care (LTC) program is a potentially important factor for the labor supply of female informal caregivers, there are only a handful of individual-level studies on this topic and the macro-level impacts of LTC programs are still largely unknown. Exploiting the introduction of nationwide long-term care insurance (LTCI) in Japan and utilizing a synthetic control method, we examine how LTCI introduction has altered the trends of public expenditures on in-kind benefits for the elderly, public health expenditure, and female labor force participation. The estimation results using the panel data of OECD countries (1980–2013) suggest that LTCI introduction substantially increased the in-kind benefits for the elderly by around one percentage point of GDP 10 years after LTCI introduction, but we do not find a positive effect on the labor force participation for middle-aged women. The fact that we do not observe any positive LTCI effects on middle-aged female labor force participation on a macro level implies that positive LTCI effects on female labor supply observed in some previous microlevel studies may be cancelled out by some other factors or are small enough to be detected under a general-equilibrium setting.

We estimate effective and optimal net income tax schedules and compare them to the estimated statutory rates for the case of Lithuania for the period 2014–2015. Values of effective net tax rates are estimated from the survey of EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions; the statutory net tax rates are estimated with the European tax-benefit simulator EUROMOD, whereas optimal net taxes are calculated via Saez (2002) methodology. We find that the three net tax schedules are similar for employees in the middle of the income distribution. At the bottom of the income distribution, optimal net tax schedules suggest higher in-work benefits. The net tax schedules diverge substantially for the self-employed. At the top of the income distribution, where the majority of self-employed are concentrated, the self-employed are required to pay 15 cents less net taxes per Euro than employees—and they effectively pay 29 cents less.

This paper evaluates the effect of a self-employment grant scheme for unemployed individuals—designed to ease the first 12 months of business operation—on firm growth, survival, and labor market reintegration in Croatia in the 2010–2017 period. Grants offered a moderate amount of finances (up to 50% of average annual gross salary) and absorbed only 5% of funds allocated to active labor market policies (ALMPs), but accounted for 10% of new firms opened throughout the years. We contribute to the literature on self-employment grants with several novel findings. Exploiting the longitudinal structure of the unemployment episodes dataset, we find that individuals who finish their spell with a grant have a significantly lower probability of returning to unemployment. The policy is particularly effective for individuals who would have otherwise had labor market opportunities (men, more educated, prime-age workers, previously employed), individuals who became unemployed after inactivity and lost their job due to a firm's closure—which demonstrates that self-employment subsidies can be effective in ameliorating unemployment. However, the policy was not effective for longer unemployed individuals. At the firm level, we find descriptive evidence that limited liability firms opened via a grant have lower growth potential and worse survival profile, while unlimited liability firms—even though a sizable portion of them closes after a required 12-month grant period—have a more favorable survival profile. Finally, we also find that the effectiveness of these grants has increased throughout the years, indicating toward the direction of institutional learning.

This paper characterizes the labor market of youth in Colombia from 2008 to 2017. We estimate labor market indicators for individuals aged between 14 and 28 years using microdata from Colombia's household surveys over the study period. Our estimates document the main patterns and trends in the labor market of youth in labor force participation, employment, unemployment, informality, and earnings. We compare these statistics with the same indicators of adults (individuals aged between 29 and 65 years), and explore differences in characteristics within youth such as gender, region, educational attainment, socioeconomic status (SES), and experience. Results indicate that participation rate of young Colombians have increased in recent years, but are mainly employed in low-quality jobs namely unsalaried and informal. We also document marked inequalities in labor market outcomes across youth characteristics. We provide a series of recommendations to guide future youth labor policy based on these estimates as well as the critical analysis of recent youth policies in Colombia.

Youth unemployment in Uganda increased from 12.7% in 2012/13 to 13.3 in 2016/17, despite a decline in the overall national unemployment rate from 11.1% to 9.2%. This poses serious development challenges, particularly to the ongoing efforts to poverty reduction. The main objective of the current study is to examine the extent to which gender, education, residence, and age determine youth unemployment in Uganda. Using recent data from the Uganda National Household Survey 2016/17 collected by the Uganda National Bureau of Statistics, we obtained a sample of 5,912 respondents for the ages between 18 years and 30 years. The main findings based on a binary logistic regression approach, reveal that education, gender, residence, and age are all critical in driving youth unemployment. The Ugandan youth who has some level of education is more likely to be unemployed compared to those with no education. But the youth that attended post-secondary education is associated with the highest unemployment probability followed by those with secondary school education and finally by primary education. While an increase in age appears to increase youth unemployment for females, the married youth have less chances of being unemployed compared to the unmarried youth. Moreover, as the probability of being unemployed reduces for the married youth, being divorced increases that probability. Similarly, the male youth are found more likely to be unemployed than their female counterparts. Additionally, the urban youth increased their chances of unemployment compared to the rural ones. Likewise, males are far more likely to remain in unemployment relative to females, just as living in the northern, eastern, or western region as a youth is less risky in terms of unemployment compared to living in the central region. On the other hand, whereas the education level of the household head is not important for youth unemployment, the marital status and gender of the household head are critical. The indirect effects of education, gender, residence, and age are clearly notable. Implications for policy and research are drawn.

Revisiting research from the 1990s from Castillo-Freeman and Krueger, I use the synthetic control method of Abadie et al. to estimate the impact of the most recent increase in the federal minimum wage on employment in Puerto Rico. I estimate that the employment/population ratio of various groups in Puerto Rico was significantly lower than that of a data-constructed synthetic Puerto Rico which did not raise its minimum wage. Placebo tests on other donor units, time periods, and population groups suggest that a significant portion of this gap is a result of the minimum wage. Groups with greater exposure to the minimum wage, such as teens and restaurant workers, experienced proportionally greater declines in employment. My results suggest an own-wage elasticity of employment in Puerto Rico of −0.68, higher than estimates from the mainland, which suggests that the employment response to minimum wages may be more dramatic at higher relative minimum wages.