Several studies have documented that employer incentives, in form of experience rating, co-insurance or deductibles, could decrease the social insurance usage. Such employer incentives may though have unintended side effects, as it gives employers incentives to transfer the costs to their...

Poor heath, large acute and long-term care medical expenses, and spousal death are significant drivers of impoverishment among retirees. We document these facts and build a rich, overlapping generations model that reproduces them. We use the model to assess the incentive and welfare effects of...

The paper presents a tractable general equilibrium model of search unemployment that incorporates absence from work as a distinct labor force state. Absenteeism is driven by random shocks to the value of leisure that are private information to the workers. Firms offer wages, and possibly sick...

What determines the structure of labour market institutions? This paper argues that common explanations based on rent sharing are incomplete; unions, job protection, and egalitarian pay structures may have as much to do with social insurance of otherwise uninsurable risks as with rent sharing and...

The transitional economies of the Former Soviet Union (FSU) have enjoyed an extraordinary period of growth and poverty reduction between 2000 and 2007 and this occurred in concomitance with significant increases in private and public transfers to households. The paper assesses the relative...

We test if social work norms are important for work absence due to self-perceived sick-ness. To this end, we use a randomized social experiment designed to estimate the effect of monitoring on work absence. The treated were exposed to less monitoring of their eligibility to use sickness...

Revisiting Parsons' 1996 article about disability insurance with imperfect tagging in a two type-economy -- individuals are either able or disabled. Here Parsons' analysis is extended in several directions. The model is generalized to allow for different utility functions over work status. The...

Agricultural workers are exposed to many risks during their life cycle and are particularly vulnerable to covariate risks, such as droughts, armed conflict and pandemics. Despite the great potential of social protection policies to protect this segment of the population, agricultural workers are...

Half of the jobs in the U.S. feature pay-for-performance. We derive novel incidence and optimum formulas for the overall rate of tax progressivity and the top tax rates on total earnings and bonuses, when such labor contracts arise from moral hazard frictions within firms. Optimal taxes account...

This paper analyzes earnings inequality and earnings dynamics in Sweden over 1985- 2016. The deep recession in the early 1990s marks a historic turning point with a massive increase in earnings inequality and earnings volatility, and the impact of the recession and the recovery from it lasted...