Working Papers

WP530. Work-from-Home as a Structural Bridge: How the Spread of Remote Work Shapes Maternal Employment in Europe

The rapid diffusion of work-from-home (WFH) has fundamentally restructured working arrangements in Europe, yet its role as a structural driver of parental employment remains under-researched. Analyzing macro-level panel data across 15 European countries (2006–2024) alongside micro-level maternal transitions, we examine WFH's impact on employment for parents of young children. We find that national WFH prevalence is positively and significantly associated with maternal employment, while no effects are observed for fathers or non-parents. A 10-percentage point increase in national WFH share increases maternal employment rates by 0.86 percentage points the following year and raises a mother’s probability of transitioning from non-employment to work by 4.7 percentage points. However, WFH primarily facilitates part-time employment, acting as a reconciliatory bridge rather than a catalyst for full-time integration. Ultimately, while remote work enhances labor market attachment, without broader structural changes to domestic labor divisions, it risks prioritizing work-family reconciliation over full career equality.

WP394. Heterogeneous employment effects of minimum wage policies

We explain the variations in the employment effects with respect to minimum wage changes among different groups of workers. Prior analyses considered only two dimensions, investigating employment effects over time across groups of workers or regions. We propose a multidimensional panel data approach to simultaneously analyze the heterogeneous employment effects of minimum wage changes across age groups, economic sectors, and regions over time. Latent heterogeneities in regional employment reactions are discovered, indicating that the employment effect in the regional labor market is the result of a combination of specific labor market features related to the composition of workers and employers.

WP241. Striking a balance: optimal tax policy with labor market duality

We develop a dynamic general equilibrium model in which firms may evade the employer contribution component of social security taxes by offering some workers secondary contracts. We calibrate the model to data from the United States and EU-14 countries and obtain estimates of the secondary labor market participation consistent with empirical evidence. We then investigate the optimal mix of the avoidable and unavoidable components of labor taxes and analyze the fiscal and macroeconomic effects of bringing the composition to the welfare optimum. We find that partial labor tax evasion makes tax revenues more elastic, but full tax compliance need not be a welfare enhancing policy mix.

Relating to the highly cited work of Trabandt and Uhlig (2011), we extend their framework to analyze the phenomenon of non-standard employment. We distinguish between avoidable and unavoidable labor taxation -- the former may be evaded by firms if they formulate a contract with a worker as a non-standard employment contract and may be associated with employers' share in labor taxation. The latter is paid by worker--households. Our results enrich the intuition about the optimal mix of the two types of labor taxation. We show that in countries where the share of avoidable labor taxes is relatively low, substantial welfare gains can be achieved by changing the mix of the two types of labor taxes. The gains emanate from higher labor supply and consumption which accompanies modest increases in secondary employment. These gains are obtained without loss to aggregate fiscal revenue. In addition to these main results, we also show that plausible estimates of the levels of tax evasion, the efficiency of tax auditing and the shares of secondary employment can be obtained from aggregate tax revenue data.

WP235. An Institutional Approach to Trade Unions’ Density. The Case of Legal Origin and Political Ideology

Which institutions may be important in terms of trade unions' density and how significant they are? However, trade unions' status is very different among states, they are still a very meaningful component of labor markets. In this paper we contribute to the debate on the institutions, which may affect the outcome of trade unions in different legal systems. Firstly, we draw on theoretical underpinnings of trade unions' activity and density. Then, we conduct an empirical analysis of the relationships between trade union density in a particular country, its legal origin and government's ideology. In this way the paper enriches an underexploited niche in institutional research devoted to labor market issues.