This paper uses a Finnish policy intervention to study tax competition among local governments. Changes in the statutory lower limits to the property tax rates are used as a source of exogenous variation to estimate the responses of municipalities to tax rates in their neighbouring...

This paper studies the effect of child-care subsidies on maternal labour supply. In the Finnish child-care system, parents taking care of their children at home receive a relatively generous home-care allowance. I use variation arising from changes in the municipality-specific supplement to this...

The study attempts to apply William Niskanen's (1971) theory of budget maximising bureaucrats to the business subsidies policy implemented in Finland, by one of the major distributor of subsidies to firms, the ministry of Trade and Industry (KTM). The empirical analysis is based on records of 15...

The study reconsiders the effects of tax progression in imperfectly competitive labour markets. Allowing for the individual supply of working hours, we show that the results derived in the standard model of decentralised wage bargaining do not hold if the wage setting is centralised or highly...

This paper provides new evidence about the evolution of top incomes in Finland over the period 1966 - 2002. Using micro data we construct estimates of shares of top income groups. The paper shows how the proportion of income earned by the very richest one per cent has changed over time. It shows...

The paper presents a fiscal indicator that uses the fiscal situation of the previous year as a benchmark. Different revenue and expenditure items have their own of rules by which the cyclical and discretionary changes are determined. An important step in constructing the new indicator is the...

This study examines the impact of business subsidies on beneficiary and non-beneficiary firms during a short three year period, from 1995 to 1997. The indicator measuring the impact of subsidies on these firms is their Value Added growth over the three-year period. The study is based on...

This paper surveys evaluation studies of business subsidy programs conducted in Finland and abroad. The aim is to assess the evaluation methods applied and then recommend the most appropriate ones applicable in Finland. In the paper twenty seven studies are analysed; eighteen using Finnish data...

In 1992 we published estimations about the probable effects of the EU membership on the Finnish economy. The profound economic shock of the early 1990s has made the assessment of the economic impact of Finland?s EU membership a difficult task. Nonetheless, the basic trends in relative prices,...

In this paper we consider the effects of labour taxation on wages, unemployment and efficiency in a job matching framework. We derive labour market equilibrium with taxes in a model of endogenous job creation and job destruction under three alternative hypothesis of wage formation: Nash bargain,...