In a total wage concept we include fringe benefits and earnings-related insurance rights, in addition to money wage. Sickness benefit rights are an important part of insurance rights in many industrial countries. In this paper we analyse sickness benefit insurance rights and estimate their...

We derive a long-run Phillips curve that is negatively sloped at low inflation rates. Due to exogenous changes, unions want to redistribute wages across different members also in the long run. Wage stickiness, inflation targeting and union solidarity are central characteristics of our New...

We study equilibrium wage contracts in a labour market with adverse selection and moral hazard. Firms offer incentive contracts to their employees to motivate them to exert effort. Providing incentives comes, however, at a cost, as it leads to misallocation of effort across tasks. With ex ante...

This study applies Haider and Solon’s (2005) generalized errors-in-variables model to Swedish income tax data in order to produce estimates of the association between current and lifetime income. Our estimates of this association demonstrate strong life-cycle patterns. This implies that the...

This paper examines whether parental marriage confers educational advantages to children relative to cohabitation. We exploit a dramatic marriage boom in Sweden in late 1989 created by a reform of the Widow’s Pension System that raised the attractiveness of marriage compared to cohabitation to...

How can vacancy statistics be used to measure friction in job matching and the effects of friction on unemployment? First, measure deviations from instantaneous hirings by the average duration of recruitment as measured by the number of job vacancies divided by the number of hirings per month....

Minimum income protection and social assistance is the last-resort safety net of the welfare state, targeted to the most vulnerable groups in society. Poverty alleviation is thus one chief objective of such benefits. Whether this objective is fulfilled is continuously discussed and debated. This...

During WWII some 70,000 Finnish children were evacuated to Sweden and placed in foster families. The evacuation scheme limited sharply the scope for selection into foster care based on background characteristics. A first-come first-served policy was applied where the children were assigned a...

This paper represents the first analysis of the consequences of a formal wage leadership, the Swedish Industry Agreement. We show that leadership in general has implied a lowered wage level for occupational groups having signed the agreement compared to groups that have not signed it. This is as...

Income inequality increased in Sweden during the 1980’s and 90’s as did the returns to higher education. The main conclusion of this study is that increased income inequality between high and low skilled workers is demand driven and is due to the presence of capital-skill complementarity in...