EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Youth unemployment and government policy

J. Michael Orszag () and Dennis Snower
Additional contact information
J. Michael Orszag: Department of Economics, Birkbeck College, University of London, London W1P 2LL, UK

Journal of Population Economics, 1999, vol. 12, issue 2, 197-213

Abstract: Young people of working age tend to be particularly prone to labor market inefficiencies that keep their wages excessively high and their employment excessively low. These inefficiencies are usually magnified through unemployment benefit systems. This paper examines how these problems can be tackled through "employment vouchers," i.e. hiring subsidies or tax breaks for the unemployed. It examines how vouchers to the young unemployed should differ from those to the adult unemployed. The employment vouchers considered here reduce unemployment and impose no cost on the government, since they are financed by the induced fall in government expenditures on unemployment benefits. Among other things, we find that young workers should receive lower vouchers as displacement of the old rises and as deadweight from providing vouchers to the old increases.

Keywords: Youth; unemployment; ·; employment; ·; employment; subsidies; ·; adult; unemployment; ·; overlapping; generations; models (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J23 J24 J31 J32 J64 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1999-06-17
Note: Received: 15 January 1997/Accepted: 30 April 1998
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.de/link/service/journals/00148/papers/9012002/90120197.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted

Related works:
Working Paper: Youth Unemployment and Government Policy (1997) Downloads
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:jopoec:v:12:y:1999:i:2:p:197-213

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... tion/journal/148/PS2

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Population Economics is currently edited by K.F. Zimmermann

More articles in Journal of Population Economics from Springer, European Society for Population Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-30
Handle: RePEc:spr:jopoec:v:12:y:1999:i:2:p:197-213