In this paper we investigate whether local governments react on the welfare benefit levels in neighboring jurisdictions when setting their own benefit levels. We solve the simultaneity problem arising from the welfare game by utilizing a policy intervention; more specifically, we use a centrally...

In the 1990s, many municipalities developed local activation programs for social assistance recipients as a response to increasing social assistance expenditures. This study investigates the practical implementation of municipal activation policies in two different activation programs,...

The Lembaga Perkreditan Desa (LPD) in Bali are the most recent form of local finance in Indonesia. Their establishment was initiated by the provincial government of Bali after several studies on local financial institutions in Indonesia had been presented at a seminar carried out by the Ministry...

The interventionist rationale of economic policy-making in Indonesia was already laid down in the 1945 constitution, but only the abundant oil revenues during the oil boom period between 1973 and 1982 enabled the government to realize the envisaged state-led model of development. In order to...

In the 1980s, many U.S. cities initiated programs reserving a proportion of government contracts for minority-owned businesses. The staggered introduction of these set-aside programs is used to estimate their impacts on the self-employment and employment rates of African-American men. Black...

Wir untersuchen die Effekte von Basel II auf Kredite, die in den Jahren 2006 und 2007 (also vor und nach Inkrafttreten der neuen Regulierungen) an schweizer Städte und Gemeinden vergeben wurden. In einer empirischen Analyse bewerteten wir deren jeweilige Bonität, sowie die Margen ihrer...

This paper studies gender differences in labor market outcomes using data from an Internetbased CV database. The women in the database get fewer firm contacts than men, and we show that this is partly explained by differences in education, experience and other skills, is not explained by...

Reported attitudes towards immigrants are sometimes used as a proxy for ethnic discrimination. However, there is little empirical evidence of a link between attitudes and discrimination. In this paper, we use survey data on people's attitudes towards immigrants combined with data on ethnic...

Sweden has undertaken major national reforms of its school sector which, consequently, has been classified as one of the most decentralized ones in the OECD. This paper investigates whether school resources became more unequally distributed across municipalities in connection with the reforms...

This paper analyzes how student achievement is affected by resource increases in the Swedish compulsory school due to a special government grant that was enforced in the academic year of 2001/02. The analysis is based on register data that contains all students that completed compulsory...