Union density declined in Finland by more than 10 percentage points in less than ten years. This paper analyses the reasons behind the decline, using micro data from the 1990s. According to our results, the changes in the composition of the labour force and the changes in the labour market...

The standard Real Business Cycle literature mainly focuses on Walrasian models designed to fit the US institutional framework. Differences between the US and Europe, mostly evident in the labor market, suggest that a purely Walrasian model may be inappropriate to study European business cycles....

We calibrate an infinite-horizon model with endogenous growth and unemployment on actual data from the largest countries in the European Union. Two types of balanced-budget fiscal policy experiments are studied. First, the effects of separately changing the tax rates on capital, labor and...

During the last two decades, the discrete-choice modelling of labour supply decisions has become increasingly popular, starting with Aaberge et al. (1995) and van Soest (1995). Within the literature adopting this approach there are however two potentially important issues that are worthwhile...

This paper uses panel data from 1989 to 1995 on blue-collar workers in Finnish manufacturing industries and their establishments to assess the extent to which hours of work are affected by individual or establishment characteristics - observed as well as unobserved. We argue that recent research...

The paper presents a model of household labour supply that allows for simultaneous decisions of household members, complex and non-convex choice sets induced by tax and benefit rules, and quantity constraints on hours choice. The model is estimated using the 1993 Bank of Italy’s Survey of...

The commissioned study into the ageing of Australia’s population was released April 2005. The Commission found that one quarter of Australians will be aged 65 years or more by 2044-45, roughly double the present proportion. This gives rise to significant policy challenges. The Commission...

This paper is concerned with the empirical analyses of optimal taxation, adopting Equality of Outcome (EO) as well as Equality of Opportunity (EOp) as evaluation criteria. The EOp- and EO-criteria provide alternative methods for summarizing the efficiency-equality trade-off in the distribution...

The added worker effect states that unemployment of a household member leads to an increase in labour supply of another household member. This paper investigates whether there is such an effect in a developing country. We use a rich data set for urban Ethiopia. We first give a brief description...