This paper analyzes the effects of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits on unemployment exits and subsequent labor market outcomes. We exploit a piecewise linear relationship between the previous wage and UI benefits in Finland to identify the causal effects of the benefit level by using a...

This paper examines the long-term effects of extended unemployment benefits that older unemployed can collect until retirement in Finland. We consider a reform that increased the age threshold of this scheme from 55 to 57 for people born in 1950 or later. Our regression discontinuity estimates...

This paper examines the effects of unemployment benefit duration in Finland. To overcome the problem that the maximum duration of benefits is the same for all unemployed we exploit two observations. First, despite the uniform maximum benefit period, potential benefit duration at the beginning of...

Many studies have found that the exit rate from unemployment increases in the vicinity of the exhaustion day of unemployment insurance benefits. The extent to which this spike is driven by job search behavior is important for assessing the distortionary effect of unemployment insurance. Card,...

We study the responsiveness of small and medium-sized firms to corporate income taxes using population-wide administrative data from South Africa. We find sizable bunching of firms at the corporate income thresholds where the corporate tax rate increases, implying active responses to corporate...

This study estimates the effect of job loss for Finnish workers displaced during a severe recession in the early 1990s. The setting provides a sample of workers of which over 90% experienced unemployment after losing a job due to plant closure. We use linked employer-employee data to follow...

This paper uses matched employer-employee panel data on university graduates who obtained a Master's degree in 1988–2004 to study how facing adverse economic conditions upon graduation affects short- and long-term labor market outcomes in Finland. Among all graduation cohorts, the average...

Studying very detailed micro data collected around two different VAT reforms in Europe, we show that tax incidence is heavily dependent on the characteristics of the price-setting firms. The reforms generated bimodal price-change distributions; nearly all independent restaurants left prices...

Contradictory empirical and theoretical evidence on the relationship between innovation and competition has been reconciled in a model that yields an inverted U-shaped curve. I test whether the predictions of the model are supported by the data with an unbalanced panel of firms for 1990-2003 in...

We analyze the effect of municipal employees' political representation in municipal councils on local public spending. To quantify the effect, we use within-party, as-good-as random variation in close elections in the Finnish open-list proportional election system. One more councilor employed by...