The paper studies wage and employment determination in the Swedish business sector from the mid-1910s to the late 1930s. This period includes the boom and bust cycle of the early 1920s as well as the Great Depression of the early 1930s. The events of the early 1920s are particularly intriguing,...

Bureaucrats in the government sector have a double role since they are both suppliers and demanders of public employment; they are publicly employed (supply labor) and they have an important say in deciding the size of the municipal employment (demand labor). In this paper we present and...

This paper exploits exogenous variation in the price of child care stemming from a major child care price reform, to estimate the effects of child care costs on parents’ labour supply. The reform introduced a cap on the price that local governments could charge parents, and lead to...

This paper looks at welfare reforms in Italy and their effects on labour supply. I focus on social security reforms, which have taken place in the 1990s and on labour market reforms. Old age social security expenditure in Italy is high (14% of GDP) and the system has been very generous on early...

Comparing Sweden to other EU countries, labour force participation rates of older individuals and females are high. These facts are consistent with the idea that institutional design matters: access to child care, paid parental leave, and a tax system with individual rather than household income...

The modernisation of Swedish households during the twentieth century prompted a considerable productivity growth in household production, which reduced the time input for a fixed volume of routine household work by about 35 per cent 1920-1990. Much of that time was gradually transferred to the...

This paper reviews how income-support systems affect labour force participation in the UK. The UK's approach to social insurance is basic security, with modest, typically flat-rate, benefits; insurance-based benefits are relatively unimportant. Compared with the EU, the UK has high employment...

We analyse the consequences of starting a wage subsidised job, marginal employment, for unemployed workers. Marginal employment is a type of wage subsidy paid to unemployed workers and they do not lose their unemployment benefits if the wage is below a certain threshold. We ask if the unemployed...

This paper examines the labour supply disincentives of the Income Support system among single mothers with no qualifications in the UK. It uses a regression discontinuity approach that exploits the age-eligibility rule establishing automatic withdrawal of Income Support for single mothers whose...