We exploit the exceptional variation in municipality-level unemployment and spending on labor market programs in Sweden during the 1990s to identify the impact of unemployment and programs on crime. We identify a statistically significant effect of unemployment on the incidence of overall crime,...

The paper studies the relationship between teenagers first labour market experience and subsequent labour market performance using data on all Swedish youths graduating from vocational high school programmes in 1991-94. Sibling fixed-effects combined with detailed data on high school programmes,...

In June 1995, the Swedish parliament decided to cut the replacement rate in unemployment insurance from 80 percent to 75 percent, a change that took effect on January 1, 1996. This paper examines how this change affected job finding rates among unemployed insured individuals. To identify the...

Introductory economics tells us there are three factors of production: land, labour and capital. Unless a student of agricultural economics, land as a factor of production will never be mentioned again. Yet space for some industries is a significant input and that would seem to be true of...

Two general questions are posed in this paper: (a) In what ways do characteristics of the firm where the worker is employed have an influence on the worker's risk to become unemployed? (b) How do general and specific skills acquired in the firm affect the worker's unemployment risk? The...

This paper analyses recruitment practices to Samhall, a state-owned company that provides sheltered employment for individuals with severe work disabilities. Besides providing employment for disabled workers and rehabilitating them to employment outside Samhall, the company is expected to...

A number of earlier studies have examined whether extensive labour market programmes (ALMPs) contribute to upward wage pressure in the Swedish economy. Most studies on aggregate data have concluded that they actually do. In this paper we look at this issue using more recent data to check whether...

In a large sample of Swedish unemployed disabled workers, the workers participate in between zero and ten policy programmes during their unemployment spell. Clustering of programmes to about half of the sample is prominent. The number of programmes is modelled as a standard count data model, as...

We use the Swedish Job Applicant Database to empirically investigate whether being unemployed per se reduces the probability to get contacted by a firm. This database contains personal characteristics and preferences over the type of job the applicant wants to find. The data is submitted both by...

This paper estimates the macroeconomic effect of labor market programs on labor force participation. Labor market programs could counteract business-cycle variation in the participation rate that is due to the discouraged-worker effect, and they could prevent labor force outflow. An equation...