The small open economies in Scandinavia have for long periods had high work effort, small wage differentials, high productivity, and a generous welfare state. To understand how this might be an economic and political equilibrium we combine models of collective wage bargaining, creative job...

International index rankings are popular, but perhaps too persuasive. They emphasize country differences where similarity is the dominant feature. Rankings based on Doing Business, the Human Development Index and Freedom House can be misleading, not because of wrong indicators, but because the...

We show that the recent rise in Afghan opium production is caused by violent conflicts. Violence destroys roads and irrigation, crucial to alternative crops, and weakens local incentives to rebuild infrastructure and enforce law and order. Exploiting a unique data set, we show that Western...

We show that the recent rise in Afghan opium production is caused by violent conflicts. Violence destroys roads and irrigation, crucial to alternative crops, and weakens local incentives to rebuild infrastructure and enforce law and order. Exploiting a unique data set, we show that Western...

Equality can multiply due to the complementarity between wage determination and welfare spending. A more equal wage distribution fuels welfare generosity via political competition. A more generous welfare state fuels wage equality further via its support to weak groups in the labor market....

The complementarity between wage setting and welfare spending can explain how almost equally rich countries differ in economic and social equality among their citizens. More wage equality increases the welfare generosity via political competition in elections. A more generous welfare state fuels...

This paper analyses wage formation in the Nordic countries at the regional level by the use of micro-data. Our results deviate systematically from the main conclusions drawn by Blanchflower and Oswald (1994). We find no stable negative relation between wages and unemployment across regions in...

We exploit rare information on the union status of both individual employees and of their workplaces to address two related issues. First, we find a positive effect of workplace trade union density on the level of the individual's pay. Second, we find that the individual's unions membership...

Job satisfaction and job anxiety are negatively correlated. Still, using linked employer-employee data for Britain, we find that higher wages are associated with higher job satisfaction and higher job anxiety. While the association between higher wages and job anxiety is robust to the inclusion...