By international standards, unemployment in Sweden remained remarkably low throughout the 1970s and the 1980s. In the early 1990s, however, the unemployment rate skyrocketed and hit double-digit levels. Unemployment remained high for several years but exhibited a marked fall from 1997 and...

The objective of this paper is to study to what extent parents divide their estates unequally between their children. Unequal sharing of parental transfers is, for example, a necessary condition for theories of altruistic (dynastic) behavior to hold. I use a new data set based on the estate...

Do potential entrepreneurs face liquidity constraints? Or to put it differently, does a person have to be wealthy to start a new business? This question has been discussed in a large literature that has documented a positive relationship between initial wealth and entrepreneurship. However, in a...

Self-employed individuals have arguably greater opportunities than wage earners to underreport their incomes. The incentives for underreporting should be especially strong in an economy with generally high taxes. This paper uses recent income and expenditure data to examine the extent of...

This paper extends the VECM cointegration model and PT (permanent-transitory) variance decomposition framework proposed by Lettau & Ludvigson (2004) and applies them on the Swedish data spanning from 1980q1 to 2004q4. There are strong statistical evidences that the movements of aggregate...

This paper uses data on Swedish local governments to test for strategic interaction in tax setting. We make no a priori assumptions regarding the underlying behaviour of individuals, but instead attempt to test for the presence and type of underlying spatial process. First, we employ the...

Reviewing trends in the Swedish distribution of wealth it is demonstrated that the baby-boom cohorts have become relatively wealthy, both in terms of private wealth and in claims on the pension system. Results from a simulation model suggest that the elderly in the future will no longer belong...

Do governments increase public employment in election years? This paper investigates this question by using data from Sweden and Finland, two coun¬tries that are similar in many respects but in which local elections are held at different points in time. We can thereby separate an election...

We model retirement behavior in Sweden during the 1990ies with focus on voluntary early retirement where there is an option for "buy-outs". An employer can offer the employees generous pension programs if the employee agrees on early retirement. Earlier studies have neglected such offers, but in...

This short paper proposes a non-parametric method of accounting for the distribution of background characteristics when testing for segregation in empirical studies. It is shown and exemplified - using data on workplace segregation between immigrants and natives in Sweden - how the method can be...