This paper reviews evidence on social mobility in Latin America. Several studies have used data sets that collect intergenerational socio economic information. The data, though limited, suggest that social mobility is low in the region, even when compared with low social mobility developed...

This paper studies the cause of the changes, or lack of, in wage inequality in East Germany during its transition from a socialist to a market-oriented economic system. We are interested in how much of the change in the dispersion of wages can be explained by the changes in the characteristics...

This paper aims at identifying the labour share (wage-productivity gap) as a major factor in the evolution of inequality and employment. To this end, we use annual data for the US, UK and Sweden over the past forty years and estimate country-specific systems of labour demand and Gini coefficient...

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...

While the health risks associated with smoking are well known, the impact on income distributions is not. This paper extends the literature by examining the distributional effects of a behavioral choice, in this case smoking, on net marginal Social Security tax rates (NMSSTR). The results show...

The paper examines whether a worker's sick absence behaviour influences the risk of becoming unemployed. Swedish panel data are used to estimate the relationship between the incidence and duration of sick leave and subsequent unemployment. The results indicate that an increase in the number of...

This paper examines the incentive effects caused by the interactions between unemployment insurance (UI) and sickness insurance (SI), two important components of Sweden's social insurance system. There are two main topics of interest: how the sickness report rate and the length of the subsequent...

Previous research suggests that there are substantial interactions between the unemployment insurance (UI) and the sickness insurance (SI) in Sweden. Moral hazard arises in the interplay between these two social insurance systems, since by reporting sick an unemployed person can postpone the UI...

In this paper, we study the short-run effect of salary receipt on mortality among Swedish public sector employees. By using data on variation in paydays across work-places, we completely control for mortality patterns related to, for example, public holidays and other special days or events...

This paper looks at a specific type of moral hazard that arises in the interplay between two large public insurance systems in Sweden, namely the sickness insurance (SI) and the unemployment insurance (UI). Moral hazard can arise from the benefit size structure as for some unemployed persons,...