This paper addresses the role of independent insurance intermediaries in markets where matching is important. A controversial matter in the discussion concerning insurance intermediation is the issue of compensation customs and how the latter affect prices, rents and advice quality in insurance...

The goal of this first report of the 'Benchmarking Employment Offices - Nordic and Other European Comparisons (acronym BEO) is an analytical comparison of the Danish, Finnish and Swedish labour market policy principles and structures primarily from a practical point of view. The purpose is to...

Job rotation as an important element of labour market policy has only a rather short tradition in most Member States of the European Union, except in the scandinavian countries. The transnational partnership job rotation was founded at the end of 1995 and financing for job rotation projects came...

This paper presents a model yielding testable implications concerning the long-run co-movements of real exchange rates, relative productivity, the trade balance and terms of trade. Countries with higher productivity, trade deficits or improved terms of trade are found to have more appreciated...

Voluntary public unemployment systems are limited to a handful of countries, including Finland, Sweden, and, more substantially, Denmark. A voluntary system has the positive feature of other user-cost schemes, potentially efficient targeting of services. This presumes rational behavior as well...

In recent years the availability of new industry-level data allowed to evaluate the impact of labour market policies more consistently than previous standard cross-country studies. In this paper an industry-level panel is exploited to evaluate the impact of Employment Protection Legislation...

This paper considers the education of the labour force based on an analysis of trends in and the relationships between job polarization and skills mismatch. Both job polarization and skills mismatch have become topics of increasing interest, but relationships between the two have been relatively...

In this paper I will study in a comparative perspective how taxes, social transfers and tax expenditures effect the social policy goal of redistributing income. The following countries are included in the analysis: Australia, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Norway, Sweden, United Kingdom and United...

Workers have different abilities in research, development and innovation (R&D&I) activities. Firms have different “prospects for innovation”. Innovation is facilitated by matching innovators, i.e. workers that are specialized in R&D&I to firms with good prospects for innovation. Aggregate...

The report focuses on the relative macroeconomic performance since the global financial crisis of six Northern European countries with a special emphasis on Finland. While fiscal and monetary policies have definitely impacted on macroeconomic outcomes in the six countries examined, as a whole...