Employment Security Agreements, which are elements of Swedish collective agreements, offer a unique opportunity to study very early job search counselling of displaced workers. These agreements provide individual job search assistance to workers who are dismissed due to redundancy, often as...

In this paper we define and estimate measures of labor market frictions using data on job durations. We compare different estimation methods and different types of data. We propose and apply an unconditional inference method that can be applied to aggregate duration data. It does not require...

Using a Difference-in-Differences approach we evaluate the effects of a 10 percentage points reduction in the payroll tax introduced in 2002 for firms in the northern part of Sweden. We find no employment effects for existing firms and can rule out that a 1 percentage point payroll tax reduction...

In 2007, the Swedish employer-paid payroll tax was cut on a large scale for young workers, substantially reducing labor costs for this group. We estimate a small impact, both on employment and on wages, implying a labor demand elasticity for young workers at around -0.31. Since the tax reduction...

This is a study of the link between taxes and youth self-employment, using a Swedish reform implemented in 2007-09 which suddenly made the payroll tax and the self-employment tax vary by age. The results suggest that youth self-employment is insensitive to tax reductions, both in the short run...

In this paper we evaluate the effects of a regional experiment that reduced payroll-taxes by 3–6 percentage points for three years in Northern Finland. We match each firm in the target region with a similar firm in the control region and estimate the effect of the payroll-tax reduction by...

The treatment effect of a Swedish employment subsidy is estimated using exact covariate-matching and instrumental variables methods. Our estimates suggest that the programme had a positive treatment effect for the participants. <p> We also show how non-parametric methods can be used to estimate the...</p>

This paper provides a critique of the "unemployment invariance hypothesis", according to which the behavior of the labor market ensures that the long-run unemployment rate is independent of the size of the capital stock, productivity and the labor force. Using Solow growth and endogenous growth...

While the volatility of job creations has been studied extensively, the survival chances of new jobs are less researched. The question when and how to expand a firm is of importance, both from the firm’s and from a macro perspective. Adjustment cost theories and arguments about option values...

We suggest a new method to analyze the success of firm creation by looking at the persistence of new jobs created in old and in new firms. Compared to survival rates of new versus old firms, this measure has the advantage that the sustainability of job creation in different circumstances is...