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...

Literature on early retirement has generally ignored firms' role in the labour market withdrawals. Yet, as it is shown in this paper, employee incentives alone cannot explain the increase in unemployment at the end of the career. Instead, we construct an implicit contracts model where we account...

Alternative ways to organize government subsidies to unemployment insurance (UI) are analyzed in a right-to-manage model where industry level unions run UI funds of their own. It is shown that equilibrium unemployment is decreasing in the share of UI financed by the employed union members. A...