Pension Benefits, Labour Market Institutions, and Unemployment

LABOUR, 2007, vol. 21, issue 4-5, pages 595-610

Abstract: As argued by Summers et al. (Quarterly Journal of Economics 1993; 108: 385-411) and Cigno ('Is There a Social Security Tax Wedge?', CESifo Working Paper No. 1772, 2006) public old-age pension benefits may work as a wage-moderating device, thereby lessening the distorting effects of labour taxation on unemployment. An implication of this argument is that there should be a negative relationship between the generosity of the pension system and the unemployment rate, for those countries where there is a strong link between individual contributions to the pension system and benefits, i.e. countries with Bismarckian pension systems. We test this hypothesis using a panel of 20 OECD countries for the time period of 1960-2004. The paper also provides evidence on the unemployment effects of various labour market institutions. Copyright 2007 The Author. Journal compilation CEIS, Fondazione Giacomo Brodolini and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2007.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-9914.2007.00381.x link to full text (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=1121-7081

Access Statistics for this article

LABOUR is edited by Renato Brunetta and Franco Peracchi

More articles in LABOUR from CEIS, Fondazione Giacomo Brodolini and Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Series data maintained by Christopher F. Baum ().