Many European countries still provide their citizens with social insurance programs of unprecedented generosity. A cultural critique of the welfare state contends that generous social insurance has detrimental effects on work norms. This paper revisits the model of endogenous work ethic...

Based on administrative panel data from Norway, we examine how social insurance dependency spreads within neighborhoods, families, ethnic minorities, and among former schoolmates. We use a fixed effects methodology that accounts for endogenous group formation, contextual interactions, and...

Morally motivated individuals behave more cooperatively than predicted by standard theory. Hence,if a firm can attract workers who are strongly motivated by ethical concerns, moral hazard problems like shirking can be reduced. We show that employers may be able to use the firm’s corporate...

Ageing takes place in Finland some 15 years earlier than in other European countries. The central actors in implementing active ageing policies are ministries that have been co-operating with each other. Active ageing policy in Finland has some of the advantages of networking in a small country,...

The aim of this paper is to analyse active ageing and retirement in Finland at both the individual worker level and the firm level. The Finnish pension system will undergo some remarkable changes from the year 2005 on: the whole of an individual’s working life will determine his or her pension...

Against the background of the current economic research which concentrates particularly on individual and structural factors, this paper examines if and to what extent social norms (in terms of attitudes towards gender roles and work commitment) can make a complementary statement in explaining...

Work ethics affects labor supply. This idea is modeled assuming that work is habit forming. This paper introduces working habits in a neoclassical growth model and compares its outcomes with a model without habit formation. In addition, it analyzes the impact of different forms of technical...

This paper analyses optimal contracts in a principal-agent model where the agent is intrinsically motivated at the outset and there is an endogenous relationship between the structure of incentive payments and intrinsic motivation (crowding effects). The analysis shows that crowding effects have...