Low-wage subsidies are often proposed as a solution to the unemployment problem among the low skilled but the empirical evidence on their effects is still scarce. This paper examines the employment effects of a Finnish payroll tax subsidy scheme, which is targeted at the employers of older,...

Human capital investments increase lifetime income, but may involve substantial risk. In this paper we use a Finnish panel spanning 22years to nonparametrically predict the mean, the variance and the skew of the present value of lifetime income, and to calculate certainty equivalent lifetime...

We compare various matching estimators with the results from two randomised field experiments that evaluate the employment effects of job search training programmes. We find that commonly used non-experimental matching estimators tend to overestimate the programme effects, especially in the...

This paper estimates the effect of a major education reform on intergenerational income mobility. The Finnish comprehensive school reform of 1972-1977 replaced the old two-track school system with a uniform nine-year comprehensive school and shifted the selection of students to vocational and...

In January 2003, the unemployment benefits in Finland were increased for workers with long employment histories. The average benefit increase was 15% for the first 150 days of the unemployment spell. At the same time severance pay system was abolished. In this paper we evaluate the effect of...

This paper evaluates the labour market effects of the introduction of the polytechnic education system in Finland. The polytechnic reform gradually transformed former vocational colleges into polytechnics. Since the timing of the reform differed across schools, we can compare the performance of...

This paper examines the determinants of self-employment and transitions from salaried employment to self-employment using two sets of Finnish data from the 1990s. The results show that capital constraints have only a minor effect on new business starts. Human capital, in the form of...