This paper investigates whether the partner’s social insurance coverage affects spousal labor supply. Using a reform which increased the sickness insurance coverage for non-government workers, the spousal elasticity of sick days with respect to the partner’s benefit is estimated to 0.4....

In this paper, we update and extend “Is There a Glass Ceiling in Sweden?” (Albrecht et al. 2003) by documenting the extent to which the gender log wage gap across the distribution in Sweden has changed over the period 1998-2008. We then examine the Swedish glass ceiling in 2008 in more...

Women account for the majority of parental leave take-up, which is likely one of the major reasons for the gender gap in income and wages. Consequently, many countries exert effort to promote a more gender equal division of parental leave. Indeed, the last decades have seen an increase in...

A unique examination strategy in first year microeconomics courses is used to test for gender differences in preferences in examination behavior. Students have the possibility of attaining a seminar bonus on the final exam for near-perfect seminar attendance and are given two voluntary initial...

This paper analyses if privatisation of vocational rehabilitation can improve labour market opportunities for individuals on long-term sickness absence. We use a field experiment performed by the Employment Service and the Social Insurance Agency in Sweden during 2008 to 2010, in which over...

This paper develops an empirical framework for the problem of soft budgets which is explicitly based on a dynamic commitment problem, i.e., the inability of a supporting organization to commit itself not to extend more resources ex post to a budget-constrained organization than it was prepared...

This paper studies how social pressure affects the behavior of soccer referees. We make use of an attractive source of exogenous variation in the number of spectators at matches. Due to recent hooligan violence, the Italian government has implemented a regulation that forces some soccer teams to...

Due to tightened safety regulation, some Italian soccer teams had to temporarily play home matches in empty stadiums in 2007. We exploit this event and find that referees exhibited home bias caused by social pressure when spectators were present.

Previous empirical studies have found a positive relationship between the size of legislature and the size of government. Those studies, however, do not adequately address the concerns of endogeneity. In contrast, this paper uses variation in legislature size induced by statutory council size...