Several countries practice a system where laymen, who lack legal education, participate in the judicial decision making. Yet, little is known about their potential influence on the court rulings. In Sweden lay judges (namndeman) are affiliated with the political parties and appointed in...

We present new evidence on how generalized trust is formed. Unlike previous studies, we look at the explanatory power of economic institutions, we use newer data, we incorporate more countries, and we use instrumental variables to handle the causality problem. A central result is that legal...

Many comparisons of the performance of public and private producers use a public/private ownership dummy variable to capture cost differences in cross section data. This is appropriate if the producer choice is random. The dummy variable model is, however, logically inconsistent if the producer...

Many comparisons of the performance of public and private producers use a public/private ownership dummy varaible to capture cost differences in cross section data. This is appropriate if the producer choice is random. The dummy variable model is, however, logically inconsistent if the producer...

This paper investigates if conclusions regarding labour market hysteresis differ depending on whether employment or unemployment rates are studied. Applying a range of unit-root tests to monthly data from Australia, Austria, Canada, Finland, Sweden, the U.K. and the U.S., we find results for...

Recent immigrants tend to locate in ethnic "enclaves" within metropolitan areas. The economic consequence of living in such enclaves is still an unresolved issue. We use an immigrant policy initiative in Sweden, when government authorities distributed refugee immigrants across locales in a way...

Using a panel of 260 Swedish municipalities over the period 1987-1996, this paper investigates the direct displacement effects of active labour market programmes (ALMPs). Compared to earlier studies on this topic, we have more and better data. From our GMM estimations, we find that (i) there are...

A Hallmark of modern labor conomics is the close interplay between the development of theory, data sources and econometric testing. The evolution of the economic analysis of unemployment insurance provides a good illustration. New Theoretical approaches, in particular job-search theory; have...