What factors determine national differences in the size and industry distribution of employment? This study stresses the role of business taxation, employment security laws, credit market policies, wage-setting institutions and the size of the public sector. We characterize these aspects of the...

Evolutionary theorizing has a long tradition in economics. Only recently has this approach been brought into the framework of non-cooperative game theory. Evolutionary game theory studies the robustness of strategic behaviour with respect to evolutionary forces in the context of games played...

We compare the relation between foreign affiliate production and parent employment in U.S. manufacturing multinationals with that in Swedish firms. U.S. multinationals appear to have allocated some of their more labor intensive operations selling in world markets to affiliates in developing...

In an analysis of the risk-sharing properties of different types of pension systems, we show that only a fixed-fee pay-as-you go (PAYG) pension systems can provide intergenerational risk sharing for living individuals. Under some circumstances, however, other PAYG pension systems can enhance the...

In a recent review article Jonas Agell, Thomas Lindh and Henry Ohlsson (1997) claim that theoretical and empirical evidence does not allow any conclusion on whether there is a relationship between the rate of economic growth and the size of the public sector. They illustrate their conclusion...

This paper analyzes the interplay between social norms and economic incentives in the context of work decisions in the modern welfare state. We assume that to live off one's own work is a social norm, and that the larger the population fraction adhering to this norm, the more intensely it is...

This study investigates changes in the number and the size distribution of firms in Sweden in the period 1968-1993. The number and the size distribution of Swedish firms are compared to the number and the size distribution of firms in eleven European countries. A decrease in the number of...

Evolutionary game theory studies the robustness of strategy profiles and sets of strategy profiles with respect to evolutionary forces in games played repeatedly in large populations of boundedly rational agents. The approach is macro oriented in the sense of focusing on the strategy...

This note elaborates an extension of the paper 'Social Norms, the Welfare State, and Voting' by Lindbeck, Nyberg, and Weibull [1]. That paper studies the effects of a social norm against living off others work. In the welfare-state context of their model, this means that individuals who live on...

This paper addresses various attempts by so-called new Keynesians, writing mainly in the 1980s and 1990s, to strengthen the analytical basis, in particular the microeconomic foundations, of these assertions. What, exactly, have then the new Keynesians accomplished, and how should their...