How are wages set in an open economy? What role is played by demand pressure, international competition, and structural factors in the labour market? How important is nominal wage rigidity and exchange rate policy for the evolution of real wages and competitiveness? To answer these questions, we...

This paper uses a large-scale two-level randomized experiment to study direct and displacement effects of job search assistance. Our findings show that the assistance reduces unemployment among the treated, but also creates substantial displacement leading to higher unemployment for the...

In 2015, the Swedish Public Employment Service (PES), together with the Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy (IFAU), launched a large-scale randomized control trial to collect new evidence on direct and displacement effects of job search assistance (JSA). The JSA...

We describe the short- and long-term patterns of labour market entry and integration among Non-Western, predominantly non-labour, immigrants to Sweden. Our main sample considers the 1990-2014 period. The patterns of time to first contact and labour market entry vary with business cycle...

Using a panel of 260 Swedish municipalities over the period 1987-1996, this paper investigates the direct displacement effects of active labour market programmes (ALMPs). Compared to earlier studies on this topic, we have more and better data. From our GMM estimations, we find that (i) there are...

The treatment effect of a Swedish employment subsidy is estimated using exact covariate-matching and instrumental variables methods. Our estimates suggest that the programme had a positive treatment effect for the participants. We also show how non-parametric methods can be used to estimate the...

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...

Evaluations of labour market programs and other related measures typically make use of observational data. This paper presents an outline for producing experimental data in the interest of testing a proposed measure targeted to un-employed immigrant workers. The idea is to offer them placement...

The paper studies the relative effectiveness of various Swedish labour market policies for young workers. Using age discontinuities which define the policy regime each individual is covered by, we present quasi-experimental evidence on the relative efficiency of different policy regimes...