We analyze the consequences for sickness absence of a selective softening of job security legislation for small firms in Sweden in 2001. According to our differences-in-difference estimates, aggregate absence in these firms fell by 0.2-0.3 days per year. This aggregate net figure hides important...

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...

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...

The theoretical predictions of how employment protection affects firm productivity are ambiguous. In this paper I study the effect of employment protection rules on labor productivity using micro data on Swedish firms. A reform of the employment protection rules in 2001 made it possible for...

In 2007, the Swedish employer-paid payroll tax was cut on a large scale for young workers, substantially reducing labor costs for this group. Using Difference-in-Differences paired with exact matching, we estimate a small impact, both on employment and on wages, implying a labor demand...

This paper starts out with a brief discussion of the historical background, the justifications and the political forces behind the built up of the modern welfare state. It also summarizes its major achievements in terms of economic efficiency and redistribution. The paper also tries to identify...

This paper utilizes data from a Swedish household survey for 1984 (The HUS data) in combination with data on public daycare fees and spaces per child by community. We argue that the subsidy rate and availability of spaces determined by the political leaders of the community is to a large extent...

The aim of this paper is to study the impact of the size and the quality of social networks on the probability to find a job. We first develop a theoretical model in which individuals are embedded within a network of social relationships. Workers can obtain information about jobs via employed...

Does the average level of sickness absence in a neighborhood affect individual sickness absence through social interaction on the neighborhood level? To answer this question, we consider evidence of local benefit-dependency cultures. Well-known methodological problems in this type of analysis...