How are wages set in an open economy? What role is played by demand pressure, international competition, and structural factors in the labour market? How important is nominal wage rigidity and exchange rate policy for the evolution of real wages and competitiveness? To answer these questions, we...

According to the standard union bargaining model, unemployment benefits should have big effects on wages, but product market prices and productivity should play no role in the wage bargain. We formulate an alternative strategic bargaining model, where labour and product market conditions...

The Swedish experiences of the 1990s provide a unique example of how large-scale active labor market programmes (ALMPs) have been used as a means to fight high unemployment. This paper surveys the empirical studies of the effects of ALMPs in Sweden. On the whole, ALMPs have probably reduced open...

Until recently, an unemployed person in Sweden who participated in an active labour market programme earned entitlement to a further 60 weeks of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits. A "carousel" effect - cycling between periods of open unemployment and participation in active programmes -...

In 2015, the Swedish Public Employment Service (PES), together with the Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy (IFAU), launched a large-scale randomized control trial to collect new evidence on direct and displacement effects of job search assistance (JSA). The JSA...

Using a panel of 260 Swedish municipalities over the period 1987-1996, this paper investigates the direct displacement effects of active labour market programmes (ALMPs). Compared to earlier studies on this topic, we have more and better data. From our GMM estimations, we find that (i) there are...

The treatment effect of a Swedish employment subsidy is estimated using exact covariate-matching and instrumental variables methods. Our estimates suggest that the programme had a positive treatment effect for the participants. We also show how non-parametric methods can be used to estimate the...

Swedish unemployment was very low up to the early 1990s when it rose rapidly. At the same time manufacturing employment fell by more than 20 %. The decentralisation of wage bargaining that started in 1983 may have contributed to this by making employment more shock sensitive or by increasing...

Evaluations of labour market programs and other related measures typically make use of observational data. This paper presents an outline for producing experimental data in the interest of testing a proposed measure targeted to un-employed immigrant workers. The idea is to offer them placement...