IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hhs/iuiwop/1031.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Effects of Payroll Tax Cuts for Young Workers

Author

Listed:

Abstract

In response to high and enduring youth unemployment, large payroll tax cuts for young workers were implemented in two Swedish reforms in 2007 and 2009. This paper analyses the effects of the reforms on worker outcomes and firm performance in the retail industry, an important employer of young workers. In general, the estimated effects on job accessions, separations, hours and wages, are small. For workers close to the minimum wage the estimates suggest larger, but still modest, effects on the probability of job accession. There is also some evidence on increasing profits in a subsample of firms that employed relatively many young workers before the first reform, with estimated effects commensurate with small behavioural effects of the payroll tax cuts. The conclusion is that reducing payroll taxes is a costly means of improving employment prospects for the young.

Suggested Citation

  • Skedinger, Per, 2014. "Effects of Payroll Tax Cuts for Young Workers," Working Paper Series 1031, Research Institute of Industrial Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:hhs:iuiwop:1031
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.ifn.se/wfiles/wp/wp1031.pdf
    Download Restriction: no

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Edmark, Karin & Liang, Che-Yuan & Mörk, Eva & Selin, Håkan, 2012. "Evaluation of the Swedish earned income tax credit," Working Paper Series, Center for Labor Studies 2012:3, Uppsala University, Department of Economics.
    2. Pissarides, Christopher A., 1998. "The impact of employment tax cuts on unemployment and wages; The role of unemployment benefits and tax structure," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 42(1), pages 155-183, January.
    3. Anderson, Patricia M. & Meyer, Bruce D., 1997. "The effects of firm specific taxes and government mandates with an application to the U.S. unemployment insurance program," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 65(2), pages 119-145, August.
    4. Bennmarker, Helge & Mellander, Erik & Öckert, Björn, 2009. "Do regional payroll tax reductions boost employment?," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 16(5), pages 480-489, October.
    5. Mirko Draca & Stephen Machin & John Van Reenen, 2011. "Minimum Wages and Firm Profitability," American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, American Economic Association, vol. 3(1), pages 129-151, January.
    6. Gruber, Jonathan, 1997. "The Incidence of Payroll Taxation: Evidence from Chile," Journal of Labor Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 15(3), pages 72-101, July.
    7. Pencavel, John & Holmlund, Bertil, 1988. "The Determination of Wages, Employment, and Work Hours in an Economy with Centralised Wage-Setting: Sweden, 1950-83," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 98(393), pages 1105-1126, December.
    8. Ive MARX, 2001. "Job subsidies and cuts in employers' social security contributions: The verdict of empirical evaluation studies," International Labour Review, International Labour Organization, vol. 140(1), pages 69-83, March.
    9. Kramarz, Francis & Philippon, Thomas, 2001. "The impact of differential payroll tax subsidies on minimum wage employment," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 82(1), pages 115-146, October.
    10. Murphy, Kevin J., 2007. "The impact of unemployment insurance taxes on wages," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 14(3), pages 457-484, June.
    11. Huttunen, Kristiina & Pirttilä, Jukka & Uusitalo, Roope, 2013. "The employment effects of low-wage subsidies," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 97(C), pages 49-60.
    12. Cruces, Guillermo & Galiani, Sebastian & Kidyba, Susana, 2010. "Payroll taxes, wages and employment: Identification through policy changes," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 17(4), pages 743-749, August.
    13. Egebark, Johan & Kaunitz, Niklas, 2013. "Do payroll tax cuts raise youth employment?," Working Paper Series 2013:27, IFAU - Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy.
    14. Thomas Bauer & Regina Riphahn, 2002. "Employment effects of payroll taxes - an empirical test for Germany," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 34(7), pages 865-876.
    15. Holmlund, Bertil, 1983. " Payroll Taxes and Wage Inflation: The Swedish Experience," Scandinavian Journal of Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 85(1), pages 1-15.
    16. Lee, David & Saez, Emmanuel, 2012. "Optimal minimum wage policy in competitive labor markets," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 96(9-10), pages 739-749.
    17. Ossi Korkeamäki & Roope Uusitalo, 2009. "Employment and wage effects of a payroll-tax cut—evidence from a regional experiment," International Tax and Public Finance, Springer;International Institute of Public Finance, vol. 16(6), pages 753-772, December.
    18. Summers, Lawrence H, 1989. "Some Simple Economics of Mandated Benefits," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 79(2), pages 177-183, May.
    19. Helge Bennmarker & Lars Calmfors & Anna Seim, 2014. "Earned income tax credits, unemployment benefits and wages: empirical evidence from Sweden," IZA Journal of Labor Policy, Springer;Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit GmbH (IZA), vol. 3(1), pages 1-20, December.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Hildegunn Ekroll Stokke, 2015. "Regional payroll tax cuts and individual wages: Heterogeneous effects across education groups," Working Paper Series 16815, Department of Economics, Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
    2. Egebark, Johan & Kaunitz, Niklas, 2013. "Do payroll tax cuts raise youth employment?," Working Paper Series 2013:27, IFAU - Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy.
    3. repec:eee:labeco:v:55:y:2018:i:c:p:163-177 is not listed on IDEAS
    4. repec:eee:labeco:v:49:y:2017:i:c:p:55-73 is not listed on IDEAS
    5. Pierre Cahuc & Stéphane Carcillo & Thomas Le Barbanchon, 2014. "Do Hiring Credits Work in Recessions?: Evidence from France," Sciences Po publications 8330, Sciences Po.
    6. Egebark, Johan & Kaunitz, Niklas, 2014. "Payroll Taxes and Youth Labor Demand," Working Paper Series 1001, Research Institute of Industrial Economics, revised 07 Jun 2017.
    7. Neumann, M., 2017. "Earnings responses to social security contributions," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 49(C), pages 55-73.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Tax subsidy; Labour costs; Minimum wages; Retail industry;

    JEL classification:

    • H21 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue - - - Efficiency; Optimal Taxation
    • H25 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue - - - Business Taxes and Subsidies
    • H32 - Public Economics - - Fiscal Policies and Behavior of Economic Agents - - - Firm
    • J38 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs - - - Public Policy

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hhs:iuiwop:1031. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Elisabeth Gustafsson). General contact details of provider: http://edirc.repec.org/data/iuiiise.html .

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service hosted by the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis . RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.