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

Literature on early retirement has generally ignored firms' role in the labour market withdrawals. Yet, as it is shown in this paper, employee incentives alone cannot explain the increase in unemployment at the end of the career. Instead, we construct an implicit contracts model where we account...

In this paper we evaluate the effects of a regional experiment that reduced payroll taxes by 3-6 percentage points in Northern Finland for three years. We match each firm in the target region with a similar firm in the control region and estimate the effect of the payroll-tax reduction by...

In this study we analyse the effects of the changes in the school spending on the matriculation examination results. We use a large sample of Finnish senior secondary school students from the years 1990-1998. Teaching expenditure did not have a significant effect on the average test scores....

Finnish unemployment rose in the early 1990s from 3% to 18% in just four years. It has since fallen back to the average European level, being 9.0% in January 2003. In this paper, we describe the shocks leading to this unforeseen increase in unemployment. We then discuss and research the role of...

This paper estimates the effect of a major education reform on the intergenerational income mobility in Finland. The Finnish comprehensive school reform of 1972-1977 replaced the old two-track school system with a uniform nine-year comprehensive school and significantly reduced the degree of...

In January 2003, the unemployment benefits in Finland were increased for workers with long employment histories. The average benefit increase was 15 per cent for the first 150 days of the unemployment spell. In this paper we evaluate the effect of the benefit increase on the duration of...

We use individual-level panel data spanning over 42 years from the pension records to evaluate changes in job stability in Finland between 1963 and 2004. Compared with previous research on job stability we cover much longer period and for some cohorts observe the entire lifetime job histories....

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,...

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