Mark-ups are often assumed to be constant for all firms within a sector in theoretical models. This paper reflects empirically on the distributions of companies mark-ups in order to test this assumption. We use exhaustive, Finnish company level micro-data to calculate the mark-up for each firm....

The purpose of this study is to determine the substitution and price elasticities of different production inputs in numerous sectors in order to reveal how much these elasticities vary between sectors. These elasticities will be also used in practice in a vast CGE model. With 71 sectors studied,...

This paper provides new evidence about the evolution of top incomes in Finland over the period 1966?2007. Using micro data we construct estimates of shares of top income groups. The paper shows how the proportion of income earned by the very richest one per cent has changed over time. It shows a...

The tax incidence of consumption taxes across various sectors of the economy is a key aspect when designing a tax structure. However, there are very few empirical findings on this subject. This paper studies the tax incidence of consumption taxes utilising a VAT reform targeted at...

A majority of older Finns withdraw from employment via early retirement schemes years before the statutory retirement age. Over the past 15 years, a series of policy reforms have been introduced to reduce the widespread use of early exit pathways. By exploiting variation in eligibility rules...

While the literature on how intergovernmental grants affect the budget of receiving jurisdictions is numerous, the very few studies that explicitly deal with likely endogeneity problems focus on grants targeted towards specific sectors or to specific type of recipients. The results from these...

We use matched employer-employee data from Finland to model transitions out of work into sick leave and disability retirement. To identify the role of institutional factors we exploit reforms that changed medical requirements for disability pension eligibility and experience-rated employer...

We analyze free-riding behavior by Finnish municipalities prior to municipal mergers. The merger process creates a temporary common pool problem, which arises because of a delay from the initial merger decision to the actual merger. Using a difference-in-differences strategy, we find large...

This study explores whether the experience rating of employers' disability insurance premiums affects the inflow of older employees to disability benefits in Finland. To identify the causal effect of experience rating, we exploit a pension reform that extended the coverage of the...

We analyze how (anticipated) changes in the competitiveness of the seats of municipal councilors affect their voting behavior over municipal mergers. The competitiveness of the seats changes because the merger changes the composition of political competitors and the number of available seats in...