This study documents two empirical regularities, using data for Denmark and Portugal. First, workers who are hired last, are the first to leave the firm (Last In, First Out; LIFO). Second, workers’ wages rise with seniority (= a worker’s tenure relative to the tenure of her colleagues). We...

This paper estimates the impact of work environment health and safety practice on firm performance, and examines which firm-characteristic factors are associated with good work conditions. We use Danish longitudinal register matched employer-employee data, merged with firm business accounts and...

Randomized experiments provide policy relevant treatment effects if there areno spillovers between participants and nonparticipants. We show that thisassumption is violated for a Danish activation program for unemployed workers.Using a difference-in-difference model we show that the...

Voluntary public unemployment systems are limited to a handful of countries, including Finland, Sweden, and, more substantially, Denmark. A voluntary system has the positive feature of other user-cost schemes, potentially efficient targeting of services. This presumes rational behavior as well...

A major labour market challenge following the Great Recession is to avoid an increase in long-term unemployment and thus the structural unemployment rate. Active labour market policies may play an important role in this respect. We consider these issues with outset in Denmark which is a country...

The paper argues that a comprehensive activation strategy is called for - in both unemployment and disability insurance - to minimize the conflict between income insurance and work incentives and to prevent the economic crisis from causing a long-lasting decline in labor force participation. A...

Among the OECD countries, Spain faces one of the highest rates of self-employment and Denmark one of the lowest, being the difference specially relevant among women. These two countries present important differences in their labor market conditions in terms of labor market flexibility,...

In November 1991, the Commission of the European Communities commissioned the Institut für Weltwirtschaft to carry out a report on ‘Taxation in Border Regions’. This study is a revised version of the report, which was submitted in 1993. The purpose of this study is to analyse the present...

We examine the poverty rates and the income configurations among Japan and the LIS countries. The LIS countries are Germany, Italy, the UK, Denmark, the US, and Taiwan. We divide household including elderly into five types: living alone, couples only, living with their married children, living...

This paper surveys the rise of income inequality in affluent nations. Social programs are critical to keeping inequality in check, but their sustainability is increasingly threatened. A possible solution is high levels of employment.