The paper presents the Swedish institutional setting, documents basic stylised facts about fixed--term contracts, and discusses the causes of their increased prevalence. Open--ended and temporary employment exhibit strikingly different cyclical behaviour with temporary employment being more...

This article analyses the design of optimal unemployment insurance in a search equilibrium framework where search effort among the unemployed is not perfectly observable. We examine to what extent the optimal policy involves monitoring of search effort and benefit sanctions if observed search is...

In June 1995, the Swedish parliament decided to cut the replacement rate in unemployment insurance from 80% to 75%, a change that took effect on 1 January 1996. The paper exploits a quasi-experimental feature of the benefit reform to examine the effect on job finding. We compare the evolution of...

A key component of recent explanations for the growth in unemployme nt in Western Europe is a negative relation between wage rates and employment. This paper examines the evidence for such a relationship for Swedish manufacturing industry and also investigates the corresponding movements of...