Ageing puts a strain on most countries’ pension systems; forecasts show them to be more or less unsustainable. Evidence from social choice research, theoretical as well as empirical, does not seem to offer a way out of the dilemma, as the median voter will resist a reform. Despite this, Sweden...

Ageing gives rise to concern about the sustainability of pay-as-you-go pension systems. One reform option suggested is to make the system actuarial by a tight connection between contributions and benefits. The incentives for the individual will then coincide with the interest of the pension...

Since the beginning of the 1990's, sick leave benefits accruing from the tax-financed Swedish social security insurance have been reduced a number of times. In this paper we use data from the survey on the Household Market and Non-market activities to estimate a fixed effects negative binomial...

The purpose of this paper is to compare pension schemes with respect to their intergenerational redistributive effects caused by economic and demographic changes. It is shown how these effects depend on the specific design of the pension scheme, with special attention devoted to the indexation...

I use Google News TM to study the relation between news volumes and stock market volatilities. More than nine million stock market-related news stories in English and (Mandarin) Chinese are collected and the dynamics of the news volume and the stock market volatility is compared in both the...

The purpose of this paper is to empirically explore two dimensions of the firm hierarchy of international market-specific linkages using data for Swedish manufacturing firms over the 1997 to 2007 period. First, we investigate the productivity ordering with respect to importing, exporting and...

This study investigates the impact of childhood health on labor market outcomes. We used type 1 diabetes as an instrument of health because its cause is multifactorial and it is triggered by a complex combination of genetic and environmental components; its incidence is low and unforeseeable for...

The Hidden Markov Model (HMM) has been widely used in regime classification and turning point detection for econometric series after the decisive paper by Hamilton (1989). The present paper will show that when using HMM to detect the turning point in cyclical series, the accuracy of the...

Kidney transplants across the blood-group barrier are medically feasible even if blood-group compatibility is preferred from a medical point of view. However, these types of transplants are motivated by the fact that they help in increasing the number of kidney transplants with living donors....

Heterogeneity in patient populations is an important issue in health economic evaluations, as the cost-effectiveness of an intervention can vary between patient subgroups, and an intervention which is not cost-effective in the overall population may be cost-effective in particular subgroups....