Economists have concerns about the firing cost implications of mandated severance plans. Analysis reveals that predicted severance plan consequences depend critically on the precise structure of the plan. Whether governments mandate (i) severance insurance plans or (ii) severance savings plans...

I consider the health, family structure, and labor supply inter-relationships at both a theoretical and empirical level. The paper is organized in the following way. SectionI introduces the material. In Section II, a theoretical model of family time allocation among market, home, and health...

Employer-provided severance pay in the U.S. emerged among salaried workers during the Great Depression as an alternative to modest advance notice and expanded in the late 1950s and 1960s, especially among union (hourly) workers. A variety of sources are employed to estimate variations in...

Employer-provided severance pay plans became common during the Great Depression, a reaction to (i) large-scale layoffs of long-service workers, and (ii) the growing formalism of the employment relationship. Reasonably consistent series are constructed for severance plan coverage and structure by...

In this paper, we focus on a novel and potentially important aspect of the workfare policy in the Danish labor market, namely its effect on crime. We do this by exploiting two policy changes. First, we examine the effect of a series of national welfare reforms introduced during the 1990s. Those...

Focusing in particular on upper secondary education, this paper examines whether the relatively high level of expenditure on education in the Nordic countries is matched by high output from the educational sector, both in terms of student enrolment and indicators of output quality in the form of...

Active labor market programs continue to receive high priority in wealthy countries despite the fact that the benefits appear small relative to the costs. This apparent discrepancy suggests that the programs may have a broader purpose than simply increasing employment—for instance, preventing...