We use the 1952 Swedish municipal amalgamation reform to study free-riding and the common pool problem in politics. We expect municipalities that were affected by the reform to increase their debt in anticipation of a merger, and this effect to be larger if they were merged with many other...

In this paper we investigate the determinants of municipal labour demand in Sweden 1988-1995. Utilising a major grant reform in 1993, through which a switch from mainly targeted to mainly general central government grants occurred, we are able to identify which type of grants that have the...

This paper uses a dynamic stochastic rational expectations model of a small open economy to shed some light on factors determining exits from a fixed to a flexible exchange rate regime. Exits are in the model determined by a concern for macroeconomic stabilization. If cost-push shocks are...

This paper evaluates two Swedish active labour market programmes for youth, namely youth practice and labour market training. A non-parametric matching approach is applied to estimate the average program effects. Moreover, the results obtained by matching are compared to results from standard...

The paper discusses which redistributional policies are efficient when the identity of the high and low skill persons is private information. Our major purpose is to identify the more efficient policy when, presumably for administrative reasons, the policy option is confined to the choice...

This paper derives a Supply Function Equilibrium (SFE) of a pay-as-bid auction, also called discriminatory auction. Such an auction is used in the balancing market for electric power in Britain. For some probability distributions of demand a pure-strategy equilibrium does not exist. If demand...

Producers submit committed supply functions to a procurement auction, e.g. an electricity auction, before the uncertain demand has been realized. In the Supply Function Equilibrium(SFE), every firm chooses the bid maximizing his expected profit given the bids of the competitors. In case of...

Recently, a voluminous literature estimating the taxable income elasticity has emerged as an important field in empirical public economics. However, to a large extent it is still unknown how the hourly wage rate, an important component of taxable income, reacts to changes in marginal tax rates....

This paper studies how the establishment of Nuclear Power Facilities (NPF) in the 1970s and 1980s has affected local per capita income levels in NPF-located municipalities in Japan by using the synthetic control method (SCM). Eight quantitative case studies using the SCM clarify that the effects...

The objective of this paper is to study when and how much labor supply and savings of heirs respond to inheritances. We estimate fixed effects models following direct heirs, inheriting in 2004, during the years 2000–2008 using Swedish panel data. Our first main result is that the more the heir...