This paper measures the job-search responses to the COVID-19 pandemic using realtime data on vacancy postings and job ad views on Sweden's largest online job board. First, new vacancy postings drop by 40%, similar to the US. Second, job seekers respond by searching less intensively, to the...

According to search and matching theory, a greater availability of unemployed workers should make it easier for a firm to fill a vacancy but more vacancies at other firms should make recruitment more difficult. But what can we say about the expected magnitudes of these effects on firms’...

In this paper, we study the relative importance of demand and supply factors for hiring. We use a search-matching model with imperfect competition in the product market to derive an equation for total hiring in a local labor market and estimate it on Swedish panel data. If product markets are...

This study examines how workplace size relates to transitions in- and out-of sickness absence. Overall, the study finds important differences in the long-term sickness absence behavior of individuals working in small and large workplaces. In particular, the results show that the sickness spells...

This paper presents evidence on how firms react to a more generous insurance against high sick pay costs. We exploit a reform launched in Sweden in 2015, which introduced different thresholds for insurance reimbursement depending on firm size. By comparing workers in smaller firms with workers...

To evaluate search effort monitoring of unemployed workers, it is important to take account of post-unemployment wages and job-to-job mobility. We structurally estimate a job search model with endogenous job search effort by the unemployed along various search channels that deals with this. The...

This paper investigates the impact of a collective agreement stipulating a one shot increase in establishment-specific wage levels in a public-sector setting where wages otherwise are set according to individualized wage bargaining. The agreement stipulated that wages should increase in...

In 2007, the Swedish employer-paid payroll tax was cut on a large scale for young workers, substantially reducing labor costs for this group. We estimate a small impact, both on employment and on wages, implying a labor demand elasticity for young workers at around -0.31. Since the tax reduction...

We study how employee sickness absence affects worker-firm matching. We build on the idea that firms are sensitive to absence in jobs with few substitutes (unique positions). Consistent with this, we show that unique employees are less absent conditional on individual characteristics,...

This is a study of the link between taxes and youth self-employment, using a Swedish reform implemented in 2007–09 which suddenly made the payroll tax and the self-employment tax vary by age. The results suggest that youth self-employment is insensitive to tax reductions, both in the short run...