Training programs for the unemployed typically involve teaching a specific skill to ease the transition into employment. However, in 1997, the Swedish unemployed could choose general/theoretical training through enrollment in one year of full-time studies at the upper secondary school level....

In part because of high youth unemployment, students’ transition from school to work is an important policy and research topic. Public programs offering summer jobs or work while in high school as measures to smooth the transition is commonplace. The immediate effect of the programs on school...

This paper seeks to determine the effect of summer jobs offered by the public sector on high-school students’ labour market achievement by use of quasi-experimental data. Many municipalities in Sweden offer summer jobs within their organizations to high-school students. The municipality of...

Employment and wage subsidies are used to combat long-term unemployment, yet there is little research to guide the design of such programs. Discontinuities in the design and implementation of wage subsidies under the Swedish New Start Jobs-policy allow us to study effects of both subsidy rate...

Caseworkers at the Swedish Public Employment Office (PES) have an important role in helping the unemployed to find a job. In this study, I estimate the effect of caseworkers on jobseekers' future employment rates, earnings, and wages. To take into account that the average characteristics of the...

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...

Women without work after childbirth are at risk of losing their connection to the labor market. However, they may participate in adult education programs. We analyze the effect of this on the duration to work and on the wage rate, by applying conditional difference-in-differences approaches. We...

In 2007, the Swedish employer-paid payroll tax was cut on a large scale for young workers, substantially reducing labor costs for this group. We estimate a small impact, both on employment and on wages, implying a labor demand elasticity for young workers at around -0.31. Since the tax reduction...

This paper analyses if privatisation of vocational rehabilitation can improve labour market opportunities for individuals on long-term sickness absence. We use a field experiment performed by the Employment Service and the Social Insurance Agency in Sweden during 2008 to 2010, in which over...

Sweden has a long tradition of labour market policies explicitly targeting job seekers with disabilities, ranging from in-work aids to subsidized employments, aiming at strengthening their position at the labour market. To ascertain that these programs are limited to the needy they are...