The paper presents a tractable general equilibrium model of search unemployment that incorporates absence from work as a distinct labor force state. Absenteeism is driven by random shocks to the value of leisure that are private information to the workers. Firms offer wages, and possibly sick...

Self-employed individuals have arguably greater opportunities than wage earners to underreport their incomes. The incentives for underreporting should be especially strong in an economy with generally high taxes. This paper uses recent income and expenditure data to examine the extent of...

One goal of the public employment service is to facilitate matching between unemployed job seekers and job vacancies; another goal is to monitor job search so as to bring search efforts among the unemployed in line with search requirements. The referral of job seekers to vacancies is one...

The paper develops a two-sector general equilibrium search model where "goods" are produced exclusively in the market and "services" are produced both in the market and within the households. We use the model to examine how unemployment and welfare are affected by labor taxes in general and...

This paper explores the rationale for unemployment benefits as a complement to optimal non-linear income taxation. High-skilled workers and low-skilled workers face different exogenous risks of being unemployed. As long as the low-skilled workers face a higher unemployment risk, we find that...

The paper extends Ng’s (1987) model of optimal taxation of diamond goods — goods that are valued solely for their costliness. We extend his findings by analyzing how other goods should be taxed in the presence of pure diamond goods; modified Ramsey rules are derived in a basic single-type...

The increased demand for a more equal parental sharing of the responsibilities for children has led many countries to reconstruct their parental leave systems so to provide stronger incentives for fathers to participate in childcare. Father’s quotas are becoming widely spread across Europe....

The paper extends the basic Stiglitz (1982) model of optimal income taxation into general search equilibrium. When we extend the basic taxation model to include a more realistic treatment of the labor market, a number of new interesting mechanisms arise. When wages are fixed we find that a "work...

The paper extends the basic Stiglitz (1982) model of optimal nonlinear income taxation into a model featuring endogenous unemployment and wages. This means that the government needs to consider the effects on wages and unemployment when designing the optimal tax function. The tax systems’...

This paper estimates the effects of early interventions in the Swedish sickness insurance system. The aim of the interventions is to screen and, further to, rehabilitate sick listed individuals. We find that the early interventions – in contrast to what is expected – increase the inflow into...