This paper summarizes a set of expert reports commissioned by the IFAU. The expert reports cover Estonia, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. These countries represent range of welfare states, both in terms of scope and design. And in each country there are...

Using historical data, we test the validity of Wagner's law of increasing state activity at different stages of economic development for five industrialized European countries: the United Kingdom, Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Italy. In order to investigate the coherence between Wagner's law and...

This paper analyzes the economic effects of different income splitting rules for closely held corporations and sole proprietorships/partnerships in a tax system with a dual income tax. We conclude that the tax rules for closed corporations offer roughly the same cost of capital as for widely...

This paper presents a model yielding testable implications concerning the long-run co-movements of real exchange rates, relative productivity, the trade balance and terms of trade. Countries with higher productivity, trade deficits or improved terms of trade are found to have more appreciated...

The paper investigates the intertemporal spending behavior of Scandinavian local governments with particular attention to liquidity constraints imposed by balanced-budget-rules and other regulations. The main finding is that Danish local governments are more able to smooth current expenditures...

The matching method for treatment evaluation does not balance selective unobserved differences between treated and non-treated. We derive a simple correction term if there is an instrument that shifts the treatment probability to zero in specific cases. Policies with eligibility restrictions,...

Previous research has documented robust links between seasonal variation in length of day, seasonal depression (known as seasonal affective disorder, or SAD), risk aversion, and stock market returns. The influence of SAD on market returns, known as the SAD effect, is large. The authors study the...

In this contribution we link the recently re-discovered tendencies towards stagnation with the features of financialisation, which have started to dominate developed capitalist economies in the early 1980s. We review the main macroeconomic channels of transmission of financialisation-namely, the...

This paper aims at identifying the labour share (wage-productivity gap) as a major factor in the evolution of inequality and employment. To this end, we use annual data for the US, UK and Sweden over the past forty years and estimate country-specific systems of labour demand and Gini coefficient...