This paper uses administrative data to analyze a large and 8-year long employer payroll tax rate cut in Sweden for young workers aged 26 or less. We replicate previous results documenting that during the earlier years of reform, it raised youth employment among treated workers, driven by labor demand (as workers’ take-home wages did not respond). First, drawing on additional data, this then doc...

Workers’ compensation provides insurance against job-related injuries, but as many as half of injured workers choose not to file. A common explanation for this is the existence of private health insurance, an alternative source of health care that may discourage insured workers from taking the time to file a workers’ compensation claim. However, data from the NLSY paint a surprising picture: un...

We revisit the relative merits of employee-based versus employer-based labor market subsidies. While conventional analyses stress the equivalence of these approaches, we find a modest preference for employee-based approaches. Because the population of low-wage workers overlaps, but is not identical to, the populations of low-skill or low-income workers, simple employer-based approaches are like...

This paper studies how firms set contributions to employer-provided 401(k)-type pension plans. Using a reform that decreased the subsidy to contributions to capital pension accounts for Danish workers in the top income tax bracket, we provide strong evidence that employers' contributions are based on their employees' savings preferences. We find an immediate decrease in employer contributions t...

Job Market Signaling and Employer Learning This paper extends the job market signaling model of Spence (1973) by allowing firms to learn the ability of their employees over time. Contrary to the model without employer learning, we find that the Intuitive Criterion does not always select a unique separating equilibrium. When the Intuitive Criterion bites and information is purely asymmetric, the...

We set out a model of monopsonistic competition, where each employer competes equally with every other employer. The employment effects of minimum wages depend on the degree of distortion in the labor market. If fixed costs per firm are high then the labor market is relatively non-competitive and minimumwages increase employment. Conversely, low fixed costs make for a more competitive labor mar...

Efforts to enroll low-income workers in premium assistance programs are constrained by the health insurance offer rates of the firms who employ them. One solution is to target premium subsidies to small firms as well as to their low-income workers, and Massachusetts is the sole state to have tried this. Firms participating in the state’s Insurance Partnership were more likely to be self-employe...