We document the results of a repeat survey, which updates <link rid="b2">Agell and Lundborg &lpar;1995&rpar;</link>, on wage rigidity in a sample of 159 Swedish manufacturing firms, conducted during the severe Swedish recession of the 1990s. It is found that not even a prolonged period of very high unemployment and quite low...

According to a growing number of critics, the process of financial liberalization in the 1980s is to blame for the volatile macroeconomic development in a number of countries, including the United Kingdom and the Nordic countries. The authors examine how financial deregulation affected one...

An interview survey was designed to explore how personnel managers and senior wage negotiators respond to popular models of the labor market. As in A. S. Blinder and D. H. Choi (1990), the authors' results indicate that relative wages and notions of fairness are important, and that this may...

Are competitive wage premia an obstacle to growth? The answer of the architects of the Scandinavian 'model' in the 1950s and 1960s was in the affirmative. By punishing expansive and growth enhancing sectors of the economy, competitive wage premia imposed an unwarranted drag on the rate of...

Do incentives differ between large and small organizations? Results from a representative survey of compensation managers are used to shed light on the issues. I find that (i) small establishments rely less on pecuniary incentives, and have a significantly more hostile attitude towards incentive...

This paper focuses on the effects of marginal tax rates, wealth, income, and a set of socioeconomic and demographic variables on the portfolio composition of households using detailed micro data on 2,000 Swedish households. In particular, efforts are made to disentangle the effects of marginal...

In an analysis of the relative income, or relative consumption, hypothesis, it is shown that if the ratio of agent i's consumption to agent j's consumption enters into the utility function, a tax on labor income may increase welfare for all agents. If pretax wage inequality is low, all agents...