The paper analyses the interaction between economic incentives and work norms in the context of social insurance. If the work norm is endogenous in the sense that it is weaker when the population share of beneficiaries is higher, then voters will choose less generous bene.ts than otherwise. We...

Children who can count on support from altruistic parents may not try hard to succeed in the labor market. Moreover, parental altruism makes withdrawal of such support non-credible. To promote work effort, parents may want to instill norms which later cause their children to experience guilt or...

Control over borders and access to the common market are key issues in the Brexit negotiations. We explore a sequential model, where the UK can commit to mobility, and the EU may constrain trade to dissuade future secession, or to punish the UK. The model highlights the importance of whether the...

The paper examines the impact of income inequality and mobility on income redistribution in a modified median voter model where redistributive conflict takes place both between educational groups and age-groups. The effects of inequality and mobility are not unambiguous but depend on factors...

This paper analyzes economic-social interaction in China in connection with the country's change of economic system. I define an economic system in terms of a multidimensional vector of broad institutional characteristics, and I emphasize that important features of the social development are...

In this paper we treat an individual's health as a continuous variable, in contrast to the traditional literature on income insurance, where it is regularly treated as a binary variable. This is not a minor technical matter; in fact, a continuous treatment of an individual's health sheds new...

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 has turned out to be difficult to adjust welfare-state arrangements to new circumstances. This paper emphasizes developments in the labor market and changes in the structure and preferences of the family. The former include changes in demography, productivity growth and international linkages...

The expansion of welfare-state arrangements is seen as the result of dynamic interaction between market behaviour and political behaviour, often with considerable time lags, sometimes generating either virtuous or vicious circles. Such interaction may also involve induced (endogenous) changes in...