While the United Nations and NGOs are pushing for global judicialization of economic, social and cultural rights (ESCRs), little is known of their consequences. We provide evidence of the effects of introducing three types of ESCRs into the constitution: the rights to education, health and...

Abstract Little is known about the demand side of paternalism. We investigate attitudes towards paternalism among Danish students. The main question is whether demand for paternalism is related to self-control, either because people with self-control problems seek commitment devices to overcome...

Sector switching is new to the public administration literature and our knowledge about the prevalence and trends is limited. Yet, sector switching is an important phenomenon which casts light on public-private differences. We study sector switching in a modern economy using unique Danish...

A key feature of the Nordic welfare model is provision of welfare services like care, education and health. They are individual entitlements, and collectively financed. It is a prerequisite that contemporary standards of services are provided; thus the public solution is not a second rate solution...

Long-run development (in income) causes a large fall in the share of agriculture commonly known as the agricultural transition. We confirm that this conventional wisdom is strongly supported by the data. Long-run development (in income) also causes a large increase in democracy known as the...

This paper discusses how international integration affects the need and scope for welfare state activities. The first part reviews the main mechanisms, which have been considered in the literature, namely, tax base mobility, risk and race to the bottom effects in welfare policies. The second...

The paper considers a two-sector economy with a constant population: The public sector, with stable productivity, and a private sector, with productivity growth. Baumol’s law says that such an economy has no steady state. It is demonstrated what this means. Two attempts to uphold a policy that...

We show that including financial market data at daily frequency, along with macro series at standard lower frequency, facilitates statistical inference on structural parameters in dynamic equilibrium models. Our continuous-time formulation conveniently accounts for the difference in observation...

This paper shows under indeterminacy and tax evasion, an increase in corporate, labor or income tax rates pushes the economy into an expansionary pattern. These effects are reversed when the steady state is saddle-path stable.

We propose a model to study economic convergence in the tradition of neoclassical growth theory. We employ a novel stochastic set-up of the Solow (1956) model with shocks to both capital and labor. Our novel approach identifies the speed of convergence directly from estimating the parameters...