About 3% of GNP is spent on government labor market programs in Sweden, compared to 2% in Germany and less than 0.5% in the U.S. In Sweden these programs include extensive job training, public sector relief work, recruitment subsidies, youth programs, mobility bonuses, and unemployment benefits....

In the early 1990s the Swedish labour market was hit by the worst shock it experienced since the 1930s, with the unemployment rate rising to 10 percent. This development stands out in light of Sweden’s performance in the post-war period. Between the mid 1940s and the crisis of the 1990s, the...

The paper studies the efficiency of Swedish labour market policies for young workers. Using age discontinuities which define which policy regime an individual is covered by we present quasi-experimental evidence on the relative efficiency of different policy regimes currently in use. Results...

The output of the Swedish education sector is defines as the addition to lifetime incomes generated by the schooling system. Using cross-sectional information on wages, employment rates, working hours, school-participation and leisure time, all by years of schooling, the authors compute new...

According to the standard union bargaining model, unemployment benefits should have big effects on wages, but product-market prices and productivity should play no role in the wage bargain. We formulate an alternative strategic bargaining model, where labour and product-market conditions...