We use a Swedish sickness insurance reform to show that among married couples a partner’s benefit level affects spousal labour supply. The spousal elasticity of sick days with respect to the partner’s benefit is estimated to be 0.4, which is about one-fourth of the own labor supply...

Centralized wage-setting institutions compress relative wages. Motivated by this fact, we investigate the effects of centralized wage setting on the industry distribution of employment. We examine Sweden's industry distribution from 1960 to 1994 and compare it to the U.S. distribution over the...

In this paper we treat an individual’s health as a continuous variable, in contrast to the traditional literature on income insurance, where it is regularly treated as a binary variable. This is not a minor technical matter; in fact, a continuous treatment of an individual’s health sheds new...

A large literature on ex ante moral hazard in income insurance emphasizes that the individual can affect the probability of an income loss by choice of lifestyle and hence, the degree of risk-taking. The much smaller literature on moral hazard ex post mainly analyzes how a “moral hazard...

This paper examines how Science and Technology (S&T) contribute to job creation in the Chinese manufacturing sector. The ambition of transforming China into an innovation-oriented nation and the emphasis on indigenous innovation capacity building have placed Science and Technology (S&T) high on...

We develop a simple yet realistic model of income insurance, where the individual’s ability and willingness to work is treated as a continuous variable. In this framework, income insurance not only provides income smoothing, it also relieves the individual from particularly burdensome work. As...

I use Swedish establishment-level panel data to test Bertola and Rogerson’s (1997) hypothesis of a positive relation between the degree of wage compression and job reallocation. Results indicate that the effect of wage compression on job turnover is positive and significant in the...

This paper examines the effect of FDI on job creation in the Chinese manufacturing sector. As one of the world’s largest recipients of FDI, China has arguably benefited from foreign multinational enterprises in various respects. However, one of the main challenges for China, and other...

In this paper it is argued that the size distribution of firms may largely be determined by institutional factors. This hypothesis is tested in an exploratory fashion by studying the evolution of the size distribution of firms over time in Sweden for a period spanning from the late 1960s to the...

This paper examines the effects of collectively agreed increases in real minimum wages on employment transitions and hours among manual workers in the Swedish retail sector over the period 2001–05. The findings indicate that increases in real minimum wages are associated with more separations,...