Canada’s immigration system is currently undergoing significant change driven by several goals that include: (1) a desire to improve the economic outcomes of entering immigrants, given the deterioration in labour market outcomes over the past several decades; (2) an attempt to better respond to short-term regional labour market shortages often associated with commodity booms, and (3) a desire t...

Discretionary Measures of Active Labor Market Policy: The German Employment Promotion Reform in Perspective This paper provides a preliminary assessment of recent reforms of German employment promotion policy. While several recent studies analyze the impact of measures of employment promotion for the case of Germany, no comparable study exists on the aggregate level, thus precluding any assessm...

Ethnic German Immigration from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union to Germany: the Effects of Migrant Networks This paper employed a widely accepted theoretical concept, the ‘theory of migrant networks’ to look at the recent immigration and absorption experience of ethnic Germans (Aussiedler) from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union in Germany. Consistent with network theory, the ...

This paper investigates the current important issue in Taiwan that the impact of foreign workers on the rising unemployment rate by constructing a dynamic intertemporal general equilibrium model. The results show that foreign workers rob jobs from the local unskilled labor and raise the unemployment rates during the past decade. However, extending the time frame to a longer term, an increasing ...

On the Optimality of Search Matching Equilibrium When Workers Are Risk Averse This paper revisits the normative properties of search-matching economies when homogeneous workers have concave utility functions and wages are bargained over. The optimal allocation of resources is characterized first when information is perfect and second when search effort is not observable. To decentralize these o...

Exploiting Regional Treatment Intensity for the Evaluation of Labour Market Policies We estimate the effects of active labour market policies (ALMP) on subsequent employment by nonparametric instrumental variables and matching estimators. Very informative administrative Swiss data with detailed regional information are combined with exogenous regional variation in programme participation probab...

Immigrant Performance and Selective Immigration Policy: A European Perspective The European Union aims at a stronger participation by its population in work to foster growth and welfare. There are concerns about the attachment of immigrants to the labour force, and discussions about the necessary policy responses. Integrated labour and migration policies are needed. The employment chances of th...

This paper explores the labor supply effects of a large-scale policy change in the Austrian disability insurance program, which tightened eligibility criteria for men above a certain age. Using administrative data on the universe of Austrian private-sector employees, the results of difference-in-difference type regressions suggest a substantial and statistically significant decline in disabilit...

Under more and more fiscal scrutiny because of shrinking state and local budgets, workforce development programs are being asked to estimate their return on investment (ROI). This paper introduces basic concepts of ROI in workforce development programs. It distinguishes ROIs estimated for workforce programs from those that are estimated for financial investments or capital projects. The paper f...

How Do Layoff Costs Affect Employment? General equilibrium analyses of layoff costs have had mixed messages on the implications for employment. This paper brings out the economic forces at work and explains the disparate results. Specifically, we show that positive employment effects of layoff costs come through reducing labor reallocation, whereas negative effects come through reducing the pri...