Recent immigrants tend to locate in ethnic enclaves within metropolitan areas. The economic consequence of living in such enclaves is still an unresolved issue. We use an immigrant policy initiative in Sweden, when government authorities distributed refugee immigrants across locales in a way...

In Sweden adult secondary education (ASE) has been offered since 1968, but we know little about its labour market effects. ASE offers courses at the compulsory and upper secondary level and is aimed to give adults who lack these types of education. This paper provides the first long-run annual...

Swedish unemployment was very low up to the early 1990s when it rose rapidly. At the same time manufacturing employment fell by more than 20 %. The decentralisation of wage bargaining that started in 1983 may have contributed to this by making employment more shock sensitive or by increasing...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of wage compression for the gender wage gap in Sweden during the period 1968-1991. We find that the effects of changes in the wage structure on women's wages have varied over time and have had partly counteracting effects. Changes in industry wage...

Amongst the active labor market policy programs for the unemployed in Sweden, the vocational employment training program is the most ambitious and expensive. We analyze its effect on the individual transition rate from unemployment to employment using a unique set of administrative data and a...

We analyze the effect of economic incentives on worker absenteeism, using panel data on work absence for 1990 and 1991 with a sample of 1,396 Swedish blue-collar workers. During this period Sweden implemented major reforms of both its national income replacement program for short-term sickness...

We report the results from a representative survey of human resource managers in 885 Swedish firms. We estimate that during the severe recession of the 1990s, only 1.1 percent of workers took a cut in regular nominal pay. We trace the lack of wage moderation to a combination of exogenous...

We estimate a labor supply model on a random sample of Swedish male and female blue collar workers to study the effect of economic incentives on work absence behavior. We observe work absence for each day during 1990 and 1991 for each worker in the sample. We use non-parametric (Kaplan-Meier)...

This paper investigates the relation between workers on-the-job training activities and the degree of wage compression in their occupation. With respect to general training as opposed to firm-specific training human capital theory implies that the worker initiates and finances the training when...

This paper considers the effects of union-bargained minimum wages on transitions into and out of employment in the hotels and catering industry over the period 1979-99. This industry is characterised by a high fraction of unskilled labour input, high worker turnover and binding minimum wages....