IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/tep/teppwp/wp12-12.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Effects of Reduced Social Security Contributions on Employment: an Evaluation of the 2003 French Reform

Author

Listed:
  • Matthieu Bunel
  • Yannick L'Horty

Abstract

In 2003, the French government decided to reform the system managing the different minimum wage regulations and the targeted reductions to employers' social security contributions. The main objective of the reform was to simplify the complex regulations that were created by the progressive introduction of the 35-hour week. The reform incidentally created large variations in labour costs, depending on the type of firm and the wage level within the firm. This paper presents an evaluation of the impact of this reform on employment using a balanced panel of firms with more than five employees, drawn from a matching between several administrative data sources from 2000 to 2005. In both types of firm, significant employment elasticities can be found with respect to labour costs that have the expected signs: a rise of 1% in average labour costs reduces employment by 0.4%. As the majority of firms that remained on the 39-hour week received greater reductions, the Fillon reform allowed them to raise their level of employment. Firms that adopted the 35-hour week experienced the opposite: the reform led to a fall in employment. Ultimately, the Fillon reform has had no clear effect on aggregate employment, measured either in job numbers or full-time equivalents (FTE).
(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Suggested Citation

  • Matthieu Bunel & Yannick L'Horty, 2012. "The Effects of Reduced Social Security Contributions on Employment: an Evaluation of the 2003 French Reform," TEPP Working Paper 2012-12, TEPP.
    • Handle: RePEc:tep:teppwp:wp12-12
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.tepp-repec.eu/RePEc/files/teppwp/TEPP-WP-12-12-Bunel-LHorty.pdf
    Download Restriction: no

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Markus Frölich, 2004. "Programme Evaluation with Multiple Treatments," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 18(2), pages 181-224, April.
    2. 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.
    3. Islem Gafsi & Yannick L’Horty & Ferhat Mihoubi, 2004. "Vingt ans d’évolution de l’emploi peu qualifié et du coût du travail : des ruptures qui coïncident ?," Documents de recherche 04-02, Centre d'Études des Politiques Économiques (EPEE), Université d'Evry Val d'Essonne.
    4. Adriana Kugler & Maurice Kugler, 2009. "Labor Market Effects of Payroll Taxes in Developing Countries: Evidence from Colombia," Economic Development and Cultural Change, University of Chicago Press, vol. 57(2), pages 335-358, January.
    5. 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.
    6. Lechner, Michael, 1999. "Identification and Estimation of Causal Effects of Multiple Treatments Under the Conditional Independence Assumption," IZA Discussion Papers 91, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    7. Giuseppe Porro & Stefano Maria Iacus, 2009. "Random Recursive Partitioning: a matching method for the estimation of the average treatment effect," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 24(1), pages 163-185.
    8. Matthieu Bunel & Fabrice Gilles & Yannick L’Horty, 2009. "Les effets des allégements de cotisations sociales sur l’emploi et les salaires : une évaluation de la réforme de 2003," Économie et Statistique, Programme National Persée, vol. 429(1), pages 77-105.
    9. Iacus, Stefano & King, Gary & Porro, Giuseppe, 2009. "cem: Software for Coarsened Exact Matching," Journal of Statistical Software, Foundation for Open Access Statistics, vol. 30(i09).
    10. Matthew Blackwell & Stefano Iacus & Gary King & Giuseppe Porro, 2009. "cem: Coarsened exact matching in Stata," Stata Journal, StataCorp LP, vol. 9(4), pages 524-546, December.
    11. Matthieu Bunel, 2004. "Aides incitatives et déterminants des embauches des établissements passés aux 35 heures," Économie et Statistique, Programme National Persée, vol. 376(1), pages 91-115.
    12. Rajeev H. Dehejia & Sadek Wahba, 2002. "Propensity Score-Matching Methods For Nonexperimental Causal Studies," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 84(1), pages 151-161, February.
    13. Vroman, Wayne, 1974. "Employer Payroll Tax Incidence: Empirical Tests with Cross-Country Data," Public Finance = Finances publiques, , vol. 29(2), pages 184-200.
    14. Brittain, John A, 1971. "The Incidence of Social Security Payroll Taxes," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 61(1), pages 110-125, March.
    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. Lehmann, Etienne & Marical, François & Rioux, Laurence, 2013. "Labor income responds differently to income-tax and payroll-tax reforms," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 99(C), pages 66-84.
    2. Sophie Cottet, 2020. "Payroll Tax Reductions for Minimum Wage Workers: Relative Labor Cost or Cash Windfall Effects?," PSE Working Papers halshs-03010943, HAL.
    3. Clément Malgouyres & Thierry Mayer, 2018. "Exports and labor costs: evidence from a French policy," Review of World Economics (Weltwirtschaftliches Archiv), Springer;Institut für Weltwirtschaft (Kiel Institute for the World Economy), vol. 154(3), pages 429-454, August.
    4. Aziza GARSAA & Nadine LEVRATTO & Luc TESSIER, 2015. "Do Exemptions From Social Security Contributions Affect Job Creation? New Empirical Evidence From French Overseas Regions," Region et Developpement, Region et Developpement, LEAD, Universite du Sud - Toulon Var, vol. 42, pages 79-104.
    5. Richard Duhautois & Fabrice Gilles, 2013. "Payroll tax reductions and job flows in France," Working Papers hal-01006652, HAL.
    6. Etienne Lehmann & Claudio Lucifora & Simone Moriconi & Bruno Van der Linden, 2016. "Beyond the labour income tax wedge: the unemployment-reducing effect of tax progressivity," International Tax and Public Finance, Springer;International Institute of Public Finance, vol. 23(3), pages 454-489, June.
    7. Nadine Levratto & Aziza Garsaa & Luc Tessier, 2013. "To what extent do exemptions from social security contributions affect firm growth? New evidence using quantile estimations on panel data," Working Papers hal-00833049, HAL.
    8. Fabrice Gilles & Yannick L’Horty & Ferhat Mihoubi & Xi Yang, 2018. "Evaluating the impact of firm tax credits. Results from the French natural experiment CICE," TEPP Working Paper 2018-05, TEPP.
    9. Mbara, Gilbert & Tyrowicz, Joanna & Kokoszczynski, Ryszard, 2020. "Striking a balance: Optimal tax policy with labor market duality," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 66(C).
    10. Sophie Cottet, 2020. "Payroll Tax Reductions for Minimum Wage Workers: Relative Labor Cost or Cash Windfall Effects?," Working Papers halshs-03010943, HAL.
    11. Adam, Stuart & Phillips, David & Roantree, Barra, 2019. "35 years of reforms: A panel analysis of the incidence of, and employee and employer responses to, social security contributions in the UK," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 171(C), pages 29-50.
    12. Raphael A Espinoza & Esther Perez Ruiz, 2014. "Labor Tax Cuts and Employment; A General Equilibrium Approach for France," IMF Working Papers 14/114, International Monetary Fund.
    13. Aziza Garsaa & Nadine Levratto, 2015. "Do labor tax rebates facilitate firm growth? An empirical study on French establishments in the manufacturing industry, 2004–2011," Small Business Economics, Springer, vol. 45(3), pages 613-641, October.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • C14 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric and Statistical Methods and Methodology: General - - - Semiparametric and Nonparametric Methods: General
    • J3 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs
    • J38 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs - - - Public Policy

    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:tep:teppwp:wp12-12. 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: (Sylvain). General contact details of provider: http://edirc.repec.org/data/teppnfr.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.