Many comparisons of public and private firms use a public/private ownership dummy variable to capture cost differences. If, however, public and private firms use different production technologies, the dummy-variable approach is misspecified. Data from public and private firms should not be...

Is the decision to become self-employed constrained by access to credit? Swedish microdata suggest that the probability of being self-employed increases when people receive windfall gains in the form of lottery winnings and inheritances. The data, therefore, are consistent with the hypothesis...

We study three questions which are important for work sharing to increase employment. First, is there a negative long-run relation between working time and employment? Second, are hours per worker exogenous with respect to wages and employment? Third, can policy makers influence actual hours per...

Using a maximum likelihood cointegration approach, we find two long-run relationships between central government, local government, and private sector wages in Sweden. This means that there is one common trend for the three sectoral wages. Private sector wages are weakly exogenous for the...

Public employment growth has been parallelled by increased female labour force participation, while real wages for typical female public sector occupations have not increased. In a theoretical model we, first, show that there is a tradeoff between day care provision and gross wages for...

We study the Becker and Lewis (1973) quantity-quality model of children adding an explicit child care time constraint for parents. Parents can take care of the children themselves or purchase day care. Our results are: (i) If there only is own care, a quantity-quality trade-off, different from...

In 1982-83 a mining company in northern Sweden laid off 1,800 employees. The Parliament allotted SEK 309 million for a program of job-creating measures. Evaluation of these measures requires a welfare-theoretic foundation. This analysis focuses on the welfare implications of public production of...