The paper presents a tractable general equilibrium model of search unemployment that incorporates absence from work as a distinct labor force state. Absenteeism is driven by random shocks to the value of leisure that are private information to the workers. Firms offer wages, and possibly sick...

The paper presents a model that allows a unified analysis of sickness absence and search unemployment. Sickness appears as random shocks to individual utility functions, interacts with individual search and labor supply decisions and triggers movements across labor force states. The employed...

This paper examines the response of husbands' and wives' earnings to a tax reform in which husbands' and wives' tax rates changed independently, allowing me to examine the effect of both spouses' incentives on each spouse's behavior. I compare the results to those of more simplified econometric...

This paper collects and reviews information about routes to retirement and exits from the labor force by older workers in Sweden. It gives a concise survey of rules of the major retirement schemes covering disability, sickness and unemployment. Usinglongitudinal micro data from the period...

Americans work more than Europeans. Using micro data from the U.S. and 17 European countries, we study the contributions from demographic subgroups to these aggregate level dierences. We document that women are typically the largest contributors to the discrepancy in work hours. We also document...

Americans work more than Europeans. Using micro data from the U.S. and 17 European countries, we study the contributions from demographic subgroups to these aggregate level dierences. We document that women are typically the largest contributors to the discrepancy in work hours. We also document...

The paper offers a theoretical analysis of a labor market institution known as the Gent system, which is a system where unions run unemployment insurance (UI) through government-subsidized UI funds. This sytem is practiced in four Nordic countries with comparatively very high unionization rates....

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...

Existing unemployment insurance systems in many OECD countries involve a ceiling on insurable earnings. The result is lower replacement rate for employees with relatively high earnings. This paper examines whether replacement rates should decrease as the level of earnings rises. The framework is...