Tax Wedges, Unemployment Benefits and Labour Market Outcomes in the New EU Members

Alberto Behar ()

Czech Economic Review, 2009, vol. 3, issue 1, 069-092

Abstract: There has been a widely accepted belief that certain labor market institutions, including high taxation and generous benefits, can lead to low employment and/or high unemployment. To what extent do such priors about tax wedges and unemployment benefits apply to the new members of the EU? Principal Component Analysis (PCA) suggests the new members share similar characteristics to each other and should be grouped separately from the rest of Europe. There are statistically significant differences in the medians of unemployment benefits and the labor market outcomes of the less productive workers, but insignificant differences in primeage outcomes and tax wedges. Within the new members, our non-parametric analysis finds tax wedges and the duration of benefits (not the replacement ratio) are associated with poor labor market outcomes, but the evidence is weak.

Keywords: Labour market institutions; principal component analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J21 J48 J68 P27 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (18)

Downloads: (external link)
http://auco.cuni.cz/mag/article/download/id/59/type/attachment (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:fau:aucocz:au2009_069

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://auco.cuni.cz/

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Czech Economic Review from Charles University Prague, Faculty of Social Sciences, Institute of Economic Studies Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lenka Stastna ().