The implementation of explicit quantitative inflation targets elucidates the assessment of credibility of future monetary policy. Here the explicit inflation target is time-varying and stochastic with asymmetric information. It is shown that central bank independence promotes lower inflation but...

Using data from voluntary Swedish sick insurance societies 1902-1910, this paper analyzes the coexistence of pure and mutual insurance societies where pure societies are characterized by charging ex ante premiums only while mutuals in addition charge ex post assessments. <p> Mutual insurance...</p>

Trademark dilution, whereby a firm associates its product with that of another firm and takes advantage of the goodwill created by that firm, is illegal in the EU and in the US. We investigate this regulation from a welfare perspective, considering short-term effects on profits and consumers’...

The paper discusses the effect of economic reforms on gender differences in <p> participation rates and earnings in Russia in the early 1990s. Besides <p> national statistics it uses survey data from the city Taganrog, 1989 and <p> 1993/9. Although local, these repeated cross sections provide unique <p>...</p></p></p></p>

This paper investigates the effect of import competition on employment and wages in the Swedish manufacturing sector during 1975-93. Labour is divided into production and non-production workers respectively. The results show that import competition had a significant negative effect on the...

We exploit the exceptional variation in municipality-level unemployment and spending on labor market programs in Sweden during the 1990s to identify the impact of unemployment and programs on crime. We identify a statistically significant effect of unemployment on the incidence of overall crime,...

The empirical evidence suggests that parents use inter vivos gifts (i.e., transfers of tangible and financial property) to compensate less well off children whereas post mortem bequests are divided equally among siblings. We study a theoretical model assuming, first, that the amounts given is...

This study investigates the implications of capital-skill complementarity <p> for the cyclical behavior of wage inequality. This is done in a dynamic general equilibrium model which extends the standard real business cycle model in three ways. First, the representative agent is replaced by two...</p>

The macroeconomic principles behind the Swedish model were developed by two trade union economists, Gösta Rehn and Rudolf Meidner, shortly after World War II. The Rehn-Meidner model respresents a unique third way between keynesianism and monetarism in its approach to combine full employment...

The paper combines optimal taxation theory with human capital theory and develops a theoretical model with endogenous wages and education decision, in which redistributive policy experiments are carried out and assessed. It is argued that general equilibrium effects of labor income taxation on...