Self-employment grants and employment subsidies are active labor market programs that aim at helping unemployed workers to escape unemployment by becoming self-employed or being hired at an initially reduced cost for the employer. <p> In Sweden in the 1990's the participation rate in the...</p>

This paper estimates the relative efficiency of eight Swedish labor market programs in reducing the unemployment duration for participants. The analysis uses a hazard regression model and a uniquely large and rich administrative data set that contains all adult workers who became unemployed...

This paper seeks to determine the effect of summer jobs offered by the public sector on high-school students’ labour market achievement by use of quasi-experimental data. Many municipalities in Sweden offer summer jobs within their organizations to high-school students. The municipality of...

Social welfare systems usually imply specific obligations for benefit recipients. If a recipient does not comply with these obligations, a sanction involving a punitive benefits reduction may be imposed. In this paper we give an overview of the literature on the effects of sanctions in social...

We study the short-run and long-run economic impact of one of the largest losses that an individual can face; the death of a child. We utilize unique merged registers on the entire Swedish population, combining information on the date and cause of death with parents' labour market outcomes, health...

We propose a strategy for assessing how the inflow to the disability insurance program has been governed over time. We analyze the ex-ante health of individuals entering the program, compared to individuals not entering the program in the same year, by using ex-post mortality. Applying the...

Unemployment insurance systems include monitoring of unemployed workers and punitive sanctions if job search requirements are violated. We analyze the effect of sanctions on the ensuing job quality, notably on wage rates and hours worked, and we examine how often a sanction leads to a lower...

Individual labour market transitions from unemployment into temporary work are often succeeded by a transition from temporary into regular work. We investigate whether temporary work increases the transition rate to regular work. In that case, temporary work may enhance labour market efficiency....

We use a reform of Sweden’s sickness insurance system as a source of exogenous variation to analyse the presence of moral hazard. As a result of the reform, the replacement level was reduced from 90 percent of forgone earnings to 65 percent for the first three days; to 80 percent between day 4...

Carling et al (1996) analyze a large data set of unemployed workers in order to examine, inter alia, the effect of unemployment benefits on the escape rate to employment. In this paper we take a closer look at the 20 per cent of workers who were drop-outs and check the empirical justification...