An intertemporal general equilibrium model of criminal behavior is used to analyze the effect on crime of changing policy parameters. The policy parameters are the length of the prison term, the severity of punishment, and the amount of police resources. The number of crimes in society can be...

We examine how tax avoidance in the form of trade in well-functioning asset markets affects the basic labor supply model. We show that tax arbitrage has dramatic implications for positive, normative and econometric analysis of how taxes affect work incentives.

In this paper, we analyze government budget balance within a simple model of endogenous growth. For the AK model, simple analytical conditions for a tax cut to be self-financing can be derived. The critical variable is not the tax rate per se, but the "transfer-adjusted tax rate". We discuss...

We analyze the consequences for sickness absence of a selective softening of job security legislation for small firms in Sweden in 2001. According to our differences-in-difference estimates, aggregate absence in these firms fell by 0.2-0.3 days per year. This aggregate net figure hides important...

This paper presents a unified analytical framework for the analysis of social security reform. It discusses reform along two dimensions: Pay-As-You-Go versus fully funded on the one hand, and actuarial versus non-actuarial on the other. Making the system more actuarial entails a trade-off...

We develop a simple yet realistic model of income insurance, where the individual’s ability and willingness to work is treated as a continuous variable. In this framework, income insurance not only provides income smoothing, it also relieves the individual from particularly burdensome work. As...

Does the average level of sickness absence in a neighborhood affect individual sickness absence through social interaction on the neighborhood level? To answer this question, we consider evidence of local benefit-dependency cultures. Well-known methodological problems in this type of analysis...

Is the sickness absence of an individual affected by the sickness absence behavior of the neighbors? Well-known methodological problems, in particular the so-called reflection problem, arise when trying to answer such questions about group effects. Based on data from Sweden, we adopt several...

Two real-world observations are not easily replicated in models of crime. First, although capital punishment is optimal in Becker’s (1968) model, it is rarely observed in the real world. Second, criminal procedure and the evaluation of evidence vary across societies and historical periods, the...

We study the size of government and of GDP, under autocratic and democratic rule, respectively. It turns out that first, both democratic and authoritarian rulers apply the Samuelson (1954) criterion when deciding on productive public goods. Second, the labor supply elasticity and the skewness of...