| 1. |
- Alexius, Annika, et al.
(författare)
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Monetary Policy and Swedish Unemployment Fluctuations
- 2007
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Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- A widely spread belief among economists is that monetary policy has relatively short-lived effects on real variables such as unemployment. Previous studies indicate that monetary policy affects the output gap only at business cycle frequencies, but the effects on unemployment may well be more persistent in countries with highly regulated labor markets. We study the Swedish experience of unemployment and monetary policy. Using a structural VAR we find that around 30 percent of the fluctuations in unemployment are caused by shocks to monetary policy. The effects are also quite persistent. In the preferred model, almost 30 percent of the maximum effect of a shock still remains after ten years.
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| 2. |
- Bengtsson, Niklas, et al.
(författare)
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Lifetime versus Annual Tax Progressivity : Sweden, 1968–2009
- 2012
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Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This paper analyzes the evolution of tax progressivity in Sweden from both annual and lifetime perspectives. Using a rich micro panel with administrative records of incomes, taxes and benefits over the period 1968–2009, we calculate tax rates across the income distribution accounting for different tax bases as well as the role of transfers. The uniquely long time span also allows us to compute tax progressivity as realized over a cohort’s entire life cycle. Our main finding is that taxes are considerably less progressive over the lifetime than in any single year. In fact, life cycle taxes are close to proportional, bearing a redistributive effect of only a few percent. Intragenerational income mobility seems to be driving this result, although the Swedish economic crisis of the 1990s and the tax reforms of 1971 and 1991 are also important. Labor income taxes contribute less to progressivity in recent years, whereas transfers to unemployed and old-age pensioners have become increasingly important. These findings are robust to the use of different tax rates, tax bases, sample populations, rates of discounting and controls for reranking.
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| 3. |
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| 4. |
- Bennmarker, Helge, et al.
(författare)
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Do Benefit Hikes Damage Job Finding? Evidence from Swedish Unemployment Insurance Reforms
- 2005
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Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In 2001 and 2002, Sweden introduced several unemployment insurance reforms. A major innovation in the first reform was the introduction of a two-tiered benefit structure for some unemployed individuals. This system involved supplementary compensation during the first 20 weeks of unemployment. The 2002 reform retained the two-tiered benefit structure but involved also substantial benefit hikes for spells exceeding 20 weeks. This paper examines how these reforms affected transitions from unemployment to employment. We take advantage of the fact that the reforms had quasi-experimental features where the “treatments” differed considerably among unemployed individuals. We find that the reforms had strikingly different effects on job finding among men and women. The two reforms in conjunction are estimated to have increased the expected duration of unemployment among men but to have decreased the duration of unemployment among women. The overall effect on the duration of unemployment is not statistically different from zero. However, the reforms reduced job finding among males who remained unemployed for more than 20 weeks.
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| 5. |
- Boone, Jan, et al.
(författare)
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Optimal unemployment insurance with monitoring and sanctions
- 2001
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Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This paper analyzes the design of optimal unemployment insurance in a search equilibrium framework where search effort among the unemployed is not perfectly observable. We examine to what extent the optimal policy involves monitoring of search effort and benefit sanctions if observed search is deemed insufficient. We find that introducing monitoring and sanctions represents a welfare improvement for reasonable estimates of monitoring costs; this conclusion holds both relative to a system featuring indefinite payments of benefits and a system with a time limit on unemployment benefit receipt. The optimal sanction rates implied by our calibrated model are much higher than the sanction rates typically observed in European labor markets.
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| 6. |
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| 7. |
- Edin, Per-Anders, et al.
(författare)
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The Swedish youth labor market in boom and depression
- 1998
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Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This paper is concerned with the labor market experience of Swedish youths during the 1980s and the 1990s. The first objective is to portray early economic attainment among young Swedes. The second objective of the paper is to examine the impact of labor market programs on youth employment. We find that the slump in the 1990s has been associated with dramatic increases in youth unemployment and youth participation in active labor market programs. The impact on unemployment rates by age and education has been roughly proportional, however. The evolution of employment and unemployment does not offer much ground for the popular hypothesis that the recent rise in unemployment is driven by large and pervasive shifts in the demand for labor by skill attributable to technological innovation. The employment crisis has been met by an unprecedented increase in active labor market programs, in large part targeted at unemployed youths. There is a risk that these programs may crowd out regular youth employment, a hypothesis that is supported in our empirical investigation of regular youth employment in Swedish municipalities.
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| 8. |
- Ek, Susanne, et al.
(författare)
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Family Job Search, Wage Bargaining, and Optimal Unemployment Insurance
- 2010
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Ingår i: The B.E. Journals in Economic Analysis & Policy. - Uppsala : Department of Economics, Uppsala University. - 2194-6108 .- 1935-1682. ; 10:1, s. Contributions-Article 47
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Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The paper develops an equilibrium search and matching model where two-person families as well as singles participate in the labor market. We show that equilibrium entails wage dispersion among equally productive risk-averse workers. Marital status as well as spousal labor market status matter for wage outcomes. In general, employed members of two-person families receive higher wages than employed singles. The model is applied to a welfare analysis of alternative unemployment insurance systems, recognizing the role of spousal employment as partial substitute for public insurance. The optimal system involves benefit differentiation based on marital status as wellas spousal labor market status. Optimal differentiation yields small welfare gains but gives rise to large wage differentials.
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| 9. |
- Ek, Susanne, et al.
(författare)
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Part-Time Unemployment and Optimal Unemployment Insurance
- 2011
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Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- A significant fraction of the labor force consists of employed workers who are part-time unemployed (underemployed) in the sense that they are unable to work as much as they prefer. This paper develops a search and matching model to study the design of optimal unemployment insurance in an economy with unemployment as well aspart-time unemployment. Part-time unemployment provides income insurance and serves as a stepping stone to full-time jobs. Unemployment benefits for part-timers increase the outflow from unemployment to part-time work but reduce the out flow from part-time work to fulltime employment. We examine the optimal structure of benefits for unemployed and underemployed workers. The results indicate nonnegligible welfare gains associated with time limits for unemployment benefits as well as for part-time benefits. The welfare gains from optimal UI are larger when wages are fixed than when they are flexible.
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| 10. |
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