One of the most prominent trends in Western welfare capitalism during the last decades has been the expansion of welfare services as an outcome of the transition from the Fordist to a 'post-industrial' settlement, driven by changes in the wider society and the economic system. The advent of what...

Using Bulgarian Integrated Household Surveys for 1995, 1997 and 2001 this paper explores determinants of labor force status – not working, public sector employment, private sector employment and self-employment – and earnings for each of the three employment sectors. We find that while...

Social policies play a critical role in the transformation of emerging economies. This paper discusses this with reference to China and India, with their very distinctive public policy approaches. Much of the economics literature either does not pay much attention to social policy or regards it...

We examine how the gender of a sibling affects earnings, education and family formation. Identification is complicated by parental preferences: if parents prefer certain sex compositions over others, children's gender affects not only the outcomes of other children but also the existence of...

This paper presents a model where wage differences between men and women arise from taste-based discrimination and monopsonistic mechanisms. We show how preferences against women affect heterogeneity in firms' pay policies in the context of an imperfect labour market, deriving a test for the...

This paper studies firms' adjustment behavior to the growth in labor costs induced by Italian collective bargaining institutions. Our research design compares several firms' outcomes across collective agreements within the same sector and geographic location, exploiting discontinuities in...

We study the long-run stability of trade networks in a two-sided economy of agents labelled men and women. Each agent desires relationships with the other type, but having multiple partners is costly. This cost-benefit trade-off results in each agent having a single-peaked utility over the...

The degree of income inequality in Sweden has varied substantially since the 1970s. This study analyzes whether this variation has affected the crime rate using a panel of Swedish county-level data for the period 1973-2000. We consider various measures of income inequality to evaluate which part...

We exploit the exceptional variation in municipality-level unemployment and spending on labor market programs in Sweden during the 1990s to identify the impact of unemployment and programs on crime. We identify a statistically significant effect of unemployment on the incidence of overall crime,...

Return to employment, after a period of unemployment, is analyzed for a large sample of Swedish occupationally disabled workers. A piece-wise constant model is used, extended to allow for Gamma heterogeneity. Three competing exits from unemployment are accounted for; regular employment,...