Distortionary Taxation and Labour Market Performance
估算了六个主要OECD国家的季度消费、资本和劳动税率，利用典型事实方法分析税率与劳动力市场变量的周期共动关系，发现劳动税扭曲劳动力市场决策，有助于解释欧洲大陆的高失业率，但并非唯一决定因素。
Quarterly estimates of consumption, capital and labour tax rates are provided for six major OECD countries. We then use the ‘stylized facts’ methodology to evaluate the strength, sign and phase of cyclical comovements between tax rates and labour market variables. Labour taxes distort labour market de‐cisions and help explain why the unemployment rate is so high in continental Europe. However, labour taxes cannot be the only determinant of diverging unemployment rates since the labour force is also reduced by higher taxes. Finally, we offer some preliminary structural evidence showing employment growth in particular to be negatively related to the taxation of labour.