期刊名称：Economic Assessment of the Euro Area / Euroframe
出版年度：2007
卷号：SPR
出版社：The Economic and Social Research Institute
摘要：This paper provides a theoretical and quantitative analysis of various types of wellknown
employment subsidies. Two important questions are addressed: (i) How should
employment subsidies be targeted? (ii) How large should the subsidies be? We consider
measures involving targeting workers with low incomes/abilities and targeting the unemployed.
To make our analysis particularly useful to policy makers, we focus on policies that are
"approximately welfare efficient," i.e. policies that (a) improve employment and welfare,
(b) do not raise earnings inequality and (c) are self-financing. This criterion enables us
to identify policies which satisfy these favorable properties and to determine the size of
the subsidies required for this purpose.
We construct a simple, dynamic model of hiring and separations, derived from microfoundations,
and calibrate it with German data. The calibration shows that hiring vouchers
targeted at the long-term unemployed and low-income/ability workers can be approximately
welfare efficient, while low-wage subsidies do not satisfy this criterion. Even in
terms of inequality reduction low-wage subsidies are outperformed by targeted hiring
vouchers. Furthermore, hiring vouchers targeted at the long-term unemployed are more
effective than hiring vouchers targeted at low-income/ability workers. These subsidy rankings
also hold if the self-financing constraint is relaxed and the government spends a given
additional amount on the subsidies.
