This study provides causal evidence on how unconditional income support affects engagement with employment services. We analyse the Finnish basic income experiment, which replaced minimum unemployment benefits with a guaranteed income for 2,000 randomly selected unemployed individuals and removed all job-search requirements while leaving the supply of public employment services unchanged. Using administrative registers, we find a 5–6 pp decline in employment plans, and a 9 pp reduction in active labour market programmes. The decline is concentrated in programmes targeting individuals with the weakest employment prospects, while sanctions for non-compliance increase. These estimates likely represent lower-bound effects, as many treated individuals continued to claim unemployment benefits and remained subject to job-search requirements.

This paper examines the labor supply externalities of peer working hours within the public sector. I exploit a rigid Israeli policy rule that requires mothers of young children to increase their daily shifts from 7.5 to 8 hours upon their child’s first birthday. Using this exogenous variation in a window-restricted instrumental variables framework, I find that peer labor supply acts as a strategic substitute. A one-hour increase in peer working hours causes a 6-minute reduction in a worker’s own labor supply. Heterogeneity analysis supports a “free-riding” mechanism: the substitution effect is more pronounced in large teams and during periods of remote work, while it reverses to complementarity when the peer is a manager. Dynamic reduced-form estimates reveal that this effect is transitory, dissipating within three months as teams re-optimize.

We provide causal evidence on the effects of short-time work (STW) subsidies on individual short‑ and medium‑run labor market outcomes. Comparing workers in firms whose STW applications were approved to otherwise similar workers in firms whose applications were rejected, we find that access to STW leads to higher employment income and a reduced risk of unemployment. These effects, however, fade out in the second year after treatment. Around half of the employment income effect stems from the intensive margin of falling unemployed with the other half attributable to lower wages for workers with rejected STW applications. The unemployment‑reducing effect is concentrated among low‑income employees, whereas high‑income employees benefit primarily through improved earnings.

This paper develops a two-region model of interjurisdictional minimum wage competition, demonstrating that such competition yields an inefficient minimum wage even in the absence of labor mobility. The inefficiency arises because mobile capital-whether technologically complementary to or substitutable for labor-drives strategic interaction across jurisdictions. The analysis yields two main findings. First, minimum wage competition unambiguously results in an equilibrium wage that falls short of the social optimum, irrespective of the nature of capital-labor technological interaction. Second, once capital taxation becomes an available policy instrument, the technological relationship between capital and labor determines whether the equilibrium minimum wage is excessive or insufficient.