We analyze the consequences for sickness absence of a selective softening of job security legislation for small firms in Sweden in 2001. According to our differences-in-difference estimates, aggregate absence in these firms fell by 0.2-0.3 days per year. This aggregate net figure hides important...

Does the average level of sickness absence in a neighborhood affect individual sickness absence through social interaction on the neighborhood level? To answer this question, we consider evidence of local benefit-dependency cultures. Well-known methodological problems in this type of analysis...

It is commonly asserted that inflation is a jump variable in the New Keynesian Phillips curve, and thus wage-price inertia does not imply inflation inertia. We show that this "inflation flexibility proposition" is highly misleading, relying on the assumption that real variables are exogenous. In...

This paper offers a reappraisal of the inflation-unemployment tradeoff, based on ``frictional growth,'' describing the interplay between nominal frictions and money growth. When the money supply grows in the presence of price inertia (due to staggered wage contracts with time discounting), the...

The paper examines how the long-run inflation-unemployment tradeoff depends on the degree to which wage-price decisions are backward- versus forward-looking. When economic agents, facing time-contingent, staggered nominal contracts, have a positive rate of time preference, the current wage and...

A major criticism against staggered nominal contracts is that they give rise to the so called "persistency puzzle" - although they generate price inertia, they cannot account for the stylised fact of inflation persistence. It is thus commonly asserted that, in the context of the new Phillips...

This paper takes a new look at the long-run dynamics of inflation and unemployment in response to permanent changes in the growth rate of the money supply. We examine the Phillips curve from the perspective of what we call ``frictional growth'', i.e. the interaction between money growth and...