This thesis consists of four studies. The first study examines wage differentials between women and men in the Finnish manufacturing sector. A matched employer-employee data set is used to decompose the overall gender wage gap into the contributions of sex differences in human capital, labour...

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...

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...

This study explores whether the experience rating of employers' disability insurance premiums affects the inflow of older employees to disability benefits in Finland. To identify the causal effect of experience rating, we exploit a pension reform that extended the coverage of the...

This study represents the results of a comparative econometric analysis of the determinants of earnings and unemployment durations. The analysis uses two sets of panel data, one drawn from the outflows of unemployment and another from the working age population. The earnings of people leaving...

We study the earnings losses of Finnish private sector workers who lost their jobs at two very different points in the business cycle. The first group was displaced in 1992 (depression period) and the second one in 1997 (recovery period). The focal point of the analysis is the quantile...

We consider the consequences of working part-time on supplementary unemployment insurance benefits in the Danish labour market. Following the ?timing-of-events? approach we estimate causal effects of subsidized part-time work on the hazard rate out of unemployment insurance benefit receipt. We...

Using a large panel of Finnish males, we study how the recession of the early 1990s hit different worker groups and affected inequality in the labour market. Despite large employment losses the cross-section dispersion of earnings is found be almost constant, while differences in layoff and...

In this paper we describe the compiling of the integrated data which comprises longitudinal information on Finnish companies and workers. The company panel of the data is dynamically representative over time and covers a wide range of the economy. The worker panel covers in principle all people...

In this paper we evaluate the extent to which the gender wage gap in the Finnish manufacturing sector is attributable to within-job wage differentials, sex differences in individual qualifications, and disproportionate concentration of women in lower-paying firms and lower-paying jobs within...