A number of earlier studies have examined whether extensive labour market programmes (ALMPs) contribute to upward wage pressure in the Swedish economy. Most studies on aggregate data have concluded that they actually do. In this paper we look at this issue using more recent data to check whether...

This paper considers the optimal hiring strategy of a firm that is unable to observe the productive abilities of all its applicants. Whom the firm considers as hireable, will depend crucially on the extent to which the firm can use its wage setting to mirror productivity differences. However,...

This paper analyzes the design of optimal unemployment insurance in a search equilibrium framework where search effort among the unemployed is not perfectly observable. We examine to what extent the optimal policy involves monitoring of search effort and benefit sanctions if observed search is...

Social surveys are often used to estimate unemployment duration distributions. Survey non-response may then cause a bias. We study this using a unique dataset that combines survey information of individual workers with administrative records of the same workers. The latter provide information on...

This paper provides a review of the recent literature on how incentives in unemployment insurance (UI) can be improved. We are particularly concerned with three instruments, viz. the duration of benefit payments (or more generally the time sequencing of benefits), monitoring in conjunction with...

To examine the macro economic effects of government tax and punishment policies, this paper develops a three-sector general quilibrium model featuring matching frictions, heterogenous abilities and an informal sector with tax evasion. The choice of education is determined endogenously. Job...

Often, a treatment and the outcome of interest are characterized by the moment they occur, and these moments are realizations of stochastic processes with dependent unobserved determinants. We develop a simple and intuitive method for inference on the treatment effect. The method can be...

This paper considers the definition and identification of treatment effects on conditional transition probabilities. We show that even under sequential random assignment only the instantaneous average treatment effect is point identified. Because treated and control units drop out at different...

This paper re-examines inference for cluster samples. Sensitivity analysis is proposed as a new method to perform inference when the number of groups is small. Based on estimations using disaggregated data, the sensitivity of the standard errors with respect to the variance of the cluster...

Using data on product-level prices matched to the producing firm's unit labor cost, we reject the hyptothesis of a full and immediate pass-through of marginal cost. Since we focus on idiosyncratic variation, this does not fit the predictions of the Maćkowiak and Wiederholt (2009) version of the...