Social welfare systems usually imply specific obligations for benefit recipients. If a recipient does not comply with these obligations, a sanction involving a punitive benefits reduction may be imposed. In this paper we give an overview of the literature on the effects of sanctions in social...

The purpose of this study was to assess the association between involuntary job loss and alcohol-attributable morbidity and mortality. Swedish-linked employee-employer data were used to identify all establishment closures during 1990–1999, as well as the employees who were laid off and a...

This paper studies the earnings and employment consequences of involuntary job loss in Sweden during the crisis years of the 1990s among assistant and auxiliary nurses. These two occupational groups were by far those in the public sector that experienced the largest number of job losses. While...

In this paper we investigate whether a relaxation in seniority rules (the ‘last-in-first-out’ principle) had any effect on firms’ employment behaviour. Seniority rules exist in several countries and, like Sweden, most European countries have a more lenient employment protection for firms...

This paper looks at welfare reforms in Italy and their effects on labour supply. I focus on social security reforms, which have taken place in the 1990s and on labour market reforms. Old age social security expenditure in Italy is high (14% of GDP) and the system has been very generous on early...

We estimate the effects of conditioning benefits on program participation among older long-term unemployed workers. We exploit a Swedish reform which reduced UI duration from 90 to 60 weeks for a group of older unemployed workers in a setting where workers who exhausted their benefits received...

This paper provides a comprehensive evaluation of benefit sanctions ,i.e. temporary reductions in unemployment benefits as punishment for noncompliance with eligibility requirements. In addition to the effects on unemployment durations, we evaluate the effects on post-unemployment employment...

This paper analyzes the design of optimal unemployment insurance in a search equilibrium framework where search effort among the unemployed is not perfectly observable. We examine to what extent the optimal policy involves monitoring of search effort and benefit sanctions if observed search is...

In January 2003, the unemployment benefits in Finland were increased for workers with long employment histories. The average benefit increase was 15 per cent for the first 150 days of the unemployment spell. In this paper we evaluate the effect of the benefit increase on the duration of...

In 2001 and 2002, Sweden introduced several unemployment insurance reforms. A major innovation in the first reform was the introduction of a two-tiered benefit structure for some unemployed individuals. This system involved supplementary compensation during the first 20 weeks of unemployment....