The present paper evaluates the quantitative impact of a pharmaceutical reform on pharmaceutical prices. A generic substitution policy was introduced in Finland in 2003 to contain rising pharmaceutical expenditure. After the reform pharmacists were obliged to propose a cheaper alternative to a...

Regional structural change is currently among the greatest challenges facing the public sector in many EU countries. In countries like Finland, where the public sectors have a large role in providing educational, health and social services, structural change rapidly becomes a fiscal problem....

Even though Finland has proportional elections, single-party control in Finnish local councils is not uncommon contrary to what one might expect. The largest party holds more than half of the seats in every third Finnish local council and is thus likely to govern alone. This study investigates...

In this study we use the dynamic version of the GTAP model to analyse the effects of global trade policy changes and their interaction with different global climate policy regimes from Finland?s point of view, and in particular, implications for Finnish export sectors. Scenarios explore further...

The tax incidence of consumption taxes across various sectors of the economy is a key aspect when designing a tax structure. However, there are very few empirical findings on this subject. This paper studies the tax incidence of consumption taxes utilising a VAT reform targeted at...

A majority of older Finns withdraw from employment via early retirement schemes years before the statutory retirement age. Over the past 15 years, a series of policy reforms have been introduced to reduce the widespread use of early exit pathways. By exploiting variation in eligibility rules...

While the literature on how intergovernmental grants affect the budget of receiving jurisdictions is numerous, the very few studies that explicitly deal with likely endogeneity problems focus on grants targeted towards specific sectors or to specific type of recipients. The results from these...

We use matched employer-employee data from Finland to model transitions out of work into sick leave and disability retirement. To identify the role of institutional factors we exploit reforms that changed medical requirements for disability pension eligibility and experience-rated employer...

We estimate the effect of the UK Stamp Duty Land Tax on household mobility using micro data. Exploiting a discontinuity in the tax schedule as a quasiexperimental setting, we isolate the impact of the stamp duty from other determinants of mobility. We compare homeowners with self-assessed house...

We test whether voters are rational in the sense that their decision to vote depends on its expected impact on the election outcomes. By using exogenous variation in pivotal probabilities that arise at population thresholds determining council sizes in Finnish municipal elections, we provide the...