The achievements of social-welfare arrangements in Western Europe are well known: considerable income security, relatively little poverty and, in some countries, ample supply of social services. But there are also well-known weaknesses and hence considerable scope for improvement. Three types of...

This paper determines the equilibrium ownership structure in an emerging market deregulated by privatization and investment liberalization. It is shown that bidding competition in the privatization stage is necessary but not sufficient for reaching an efficient equilibrium market structure....

We analyse voter turnout as a function of referendum types. An advisory referendum produces advice that a legislature may or may not take into account when choosing between two alternatives, whereas a binding referendum generates a decisive decision. In theory, voter turnout should be higher...

In Europe, accounting standards prevent larger expenditures on employer-sponsored training from being treated as investments. Using Sweden as example, we discuss two consequences for training. First, the timing: training will be conducted when income is large enough for training costs to be...

We investigate experimentally how the share of experienced traders in double-auction asset markets affects trading, in particular the occurrence of bubble-crash pricing patterns. In each session, six subjects trade in three successive market rounds and gain experience. In a fourth round,...

This paper examines the restructuring of state assets in markets deregulated by privatizations and investment liberalizations. We show that the government has a stronger incentive to restructure than the buyer: A firm restructuring only takes into account how much its own profit will increase....

We develop a model in which delinquents compete with each other in criminal activities but may benefit from being friends with other criminals by learning and acquiring proper know-how on the crime business. By taking the social network connecting agents as given, we study the subgame perfect...

The Knowledge Capital Model (KC-model), described in Markusen (2002), encompasses both market size (horizontal) as well as factor endowment (vertical) explanations to why multinational production occurs. Although the KC-model seems intuitively appealing, the empirical support has, so far, been...

A chain of replacement model is used to examine the effects of automobile taxes and of a scrappage premium on the life length of cars, and on the size of the car fleet. The predictions of the model are tested on data on the scrappage of cars in Sweden 1989-2002. The theoretical model predicts...

This paper analyses recruitment practices to Samhall, a state-owned company that provides sheltered employment for individuals with severe work disabilities. Besides providing employment for disabled workers and rehabilitating them to employment outside Samhall, the company is expected to...