Why are there such large differences in living arrangements across Western European countries? Conventional economic analyses have not been successful in explaining differences in living arrangements and particularly the dramatic increase in the fraction of young adults living with their parents...

This paper shows that cross country differences in the generosity and the quality of the welfare state are associated with differences in the trustworthiness of their citizens. We show that generous, transparent and efficient welfare states in Scandinavian countries are based on the civicness of...

This paper provides experimental estimates of the impact of a voucher for private care within the Nordic system of universal provision of public care. The private daycare voucher acted as a significant boost for new daycare entrepreneurs to enter the market thus increasing the overall daycare...

Immigrant and native child poverty in Denmark, Norway and Sweden 1993 to 2001 is investigated using large sets of panel data. While native children face yearly poverty risks of less than 10 percent in all three countries and for all years investigated the increasing proportion of immigrant...

This paper examines the role of unobserved ability in explaining inter-industry wage differentials, drawing on data on brothers. Such data allow us to account for unmeasured abilities due to common family and community factors shared by siblings. Important advantages of this approach are that we...

The correlation in economic status among siblings is a useful ?omnibus measure? of the overall impact of family and community factors on adult economic status. In this study we compare brother correlations in long-run (permanent) earnings between the United States, on one hand, and the Nordic...

The universal Scandinavian welfare model offers generous tax financed social benefits. The scheme is associated with workfare elements as a targeting device to direct benefits to those considered deserving. Thereby social insurance and egalitarian outcomes are achieved while work incentives and...

Welfare benefits in the Nordic countries are often tied to employment. We argue that this is one of the factors behind the success of the Nordic model, where a comprehensive welfare state is associated with high employment. In a general equilibrium setting, the underlining mechanism works...

This paper derives the conditions under which fitness-reducing alleles can survive in a long-run stationary equilibrium for a trading population, extending the results in Saint-Paul (2002) for arbitrary systems of sexual reproduction.

We study effects of a firm's attempt to optimize an existing incentive scheme to increase sales growth for direct store delivery workers. Before optimization workers reported Ratchet Effects that lowered productivity. The altered incentive plan offered higher compensation for increased sales...