We examine a number of personnel practices, laws and regulations that lower the supply of labor in the Japanese economy. Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of impediments, those that restrict the movement of labor between firms, and those that discourage women from participating to a greater...

Indonesia has been severely hurt by the recent economic crisis, which has been accompanied by social tensions. Still, there are reasons to be optimistic about Indonesia's future. The economic crisis may have bottomed out and the difficult transition to democracy has started. For a sustainable...

The impact of compulsory schooling laws as well as the abolition of early selection by ability remain important issues in the educational debate. These issues were the focus of a major education reform in Sweden which was implemented in the 60s. The reform was preceded by a ``social experiment''...

In this study the effects of various types of rehabilitation programmes on different labour market and health related outcomes are estimated. The main feature of this study, compared to previous research, is that it jointly evaluates multiple treatments by nonparametric matching estimators. The...

This paper considers the opitmal incentives for motivating a risk neutral, wealth constrained agent. In particular, monitoring and pay are shown to be complementary instruments under very general conditions, extending earlier results by Allgulin and Ellingsen (1998). The paper also proves that...

Chung and Cox (1994) provided an intuitively appealing stochastic model which indicates that superstars may exist regardless of talent and which gives rise to the Yule distribution. We adopt a different empirical approach and test its goodness-of-fit using a parametric bootstrap and several...

We document a clear increase in Swedish earnings inequality in the early 1990s. Inequality in disposable income and earnings net of taxes and transfers also increased, but much less than the increased inequality in pre-government earnings. These different developments are most likely explained...

Vietnam has witnessed a dynamic restructuring of its non-state enterprises since the initiation of market reforms in the late 1980s. Based on the results of 371 private sector enterprises surveyed in 1991 and 1997, this paper analyses the transformation of one category of resurveyed enterprises...

Why do some vacancies offer a posted wage whereas others offer a negotiable wage? The paper endogenizes the choice of wage policy in a search model with heterogeneous workers. In particular, we characterize the circumstances under which there exist an equilibrium where all firms negotiate wages....

The implementation of the 1950 Swedish comprehensive school reform was preceded by a unique social experiment. During this experiment between 1949 and 1962 the new school system was implemented in stages. This allows us to study the same cohort of individuals going through two different school...