Following Neil Brenner's 3-fold periodization, the article analyses the historical development of the Swedish and the Finnish social assistance systems, from the early phase of Spatial-Keynesianism, through the phase of Endogenous Development Policies, to the present phase of Locational...

This paper analyzes how minimum local property tax rates affect local tax policy choice. In Finland, central government has raised the limits on property tax rates several times in the past 30 years. I construct a measure of forced tax rate increases caused by these reforms and examine how...

Finland is characterized by a substantial heterogeneity across its regions. Key economic indicators, such as the GDP per capita and the unemployment rate, vary widely for different areas, with Uusimaa, the region where Helsinki is located, being significantly richer than regions such as Kainuu...

Canadian National Report prepared for the Vienna University of Economics and Business, Conference on tax secrecy and transparency, Rust, Austria, July, 2012. The aim of the project is to assess how different countries regard the treatment of tax information and tax secrecy. Topics include the...

We measure the distributive justice preferences of students within eight departments in the faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Turku, Finland. We use the Finnish government's annual budget and its specific appropriations as a proxy to measure the students' underlying preferences. We...

Drawing on the OECD Well-being Framework, this paper outlines the state of well-being outcomes in Finland and identifies strengths, weaknesses and trends compared to other OECD countries. Overall, Finland is an established international leader in well-being and sustainability. Six key insights...

Do governments increase public employment in election years? This paper investigates this question by using data from Sweden and Finland, two coun¬tries that are similar in many respects but in which local elections are held at different points in time. We can thereby separate an election...

We study the role of beauty in politics using candidate photos that figured prominently in electoral campaigns. Our investigation is based on visual assessments of 1,929 Finnish political candidates from 10,011 respondents (of which 3,708 were Finnish). An increase in beauty by one standard...

In this paper, we estimate the effect of pay for politicians on who wants to be a politician. We take advantage of a considerable 35 percent salary increase of Finnish MPs in the year 2000, intended to make the pay for parliamentarians more competitive. A difference-indifferences analysis, using...

A growing theoretical literature on the effect of politicians' salaries on the average level of skills of political candidates yields ambiguous predictions. In this paper, we estimate the effect of pay for politicians on the level of education of parliamentary candidates. We take advantage of an...