We analyze how (anticipated) changes in the competitiveness of the seats of municipal councilors affect their voting behavior over municipal mergers. The competitiveness of the seats changes because the merger changes the composition of political competitors and the number of available seats in...

This paper develops a model of the relationship between public sector employment, total output and aggregate real demand in market prices, where public employment has a positive productivity effect on private output and where public employment crowds out private employment and output via wage...

This paper discusses the Finnish experiences of Active Labour Market Policy (ALMP) across the economic cycle, especially in economic downturn. Cuts in unemployment spell duration have been the main factors to contribute in decreasing the unemployment in the recent years. Subsidised employment...

This PhD thesis is a collection of studies on Finnish municipal expenditures, revenues and intergovernmental grants. The main purpose of the study was to analyse the municipal expenditure variation between the matching grants system and the formula based grants system. The aim was also to...

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...

This paper contains a set of tests for nonlinearities in economic time series. The tests comprise both standard diagnostic tests for revealing nonlinearities and some new developments in modelling nonlinearities. The latter test procedures make use of models in chaos, theory, so-called...

This paper examines the determinants of self-employment and transitions from wage work to self-employment using two sets of Finnish data from the 1990?s. The results show that capital constraints have only a minor effect on new business starts. Human capital, in the form of intergenerational...

This paper examines the possibilities of EU member countries to pursue individual trade policies after implementation of the single market. Having reviewed the relevant changes in the institutional framework formed by GATT and EU legistlation, we examine the car market as a special case. We find...

In the paper an index number measuring inefficiency of taxation is introduced which is based on an economy-wide generalisation of the input distance function. Related concepts are an input based quantity index, the index of real endowment, and a productivity index indicating effectiveness of the...