A majority of older Finns withdraw from employment via early retirement schemes years before the statutory retirement age. Over the past 15 years, a series of policy reforms have been introduced to reduce the widespread use of early exit pathways. By exploiting variation in eligibility rules...

While the literature on how intergovernmental grants affect the budget of receiving jurisdictions is numerous, the very few studies that explicitly deal with likely endogeneity problems focus on grants targeted towards specific sectors or to specific type of recipients. The results from these...

We use matched employer-employee data from Finland to model transitions out of work into sick leave and disability retirement. To identify the role of institutional factors we exploit reforms that changed medical requirements for disability pension eligibility and experience-rated employer...

Abstract This study evaluates the effects of changes in energy taxes on energy consumption between the years 1995 and 2004 using an applied, general equilibrium model for a historical simulation. During this period, Finnish energy taxation was fundamentally changed, going from an up-stream,...

The retrospectively recalled calendar of activities in the European Community Household Panel is a prime resource for cross country analysis of unemployment experience. We investigate the reliability of these data and find that 26% of unemployed respondents misreported retrospectively their...

Abstract In this study we examine the effect of church tax on the church membership decision using Finnish data. We present both descriptive statistics from an opting-out website and econometric evidence exploiting the panel structure of a large individual-level data set. Our descriptive...

This paper analyzes empirically the coalition formation of local governments. We introduce a novel econometric strategy involving choice based sampling from a spatial network to allow for multi-partner mergers in our empirical analysis. We apply our method to recent municipality mergers in...

Applied general equilibrium models have become a standard tool for the analysis of structural policies in many countries and international research organisations. Their use has been prompted by both developments in economics, but also on the growing need for quantitative policy analysis. The...

Low aggregate investment in Finland has been argued to merely reflect structural change to an innovation economy, with high R&D levels adequately compensating for reduced physical investment. This paper briefly reviews the issues and discusses the severity and persistence of the shortage....

We analyze the impact of multinational and foreign ownership on the demand for job tasks and educational skills. By using Swedish matched employer-employee data, we find that both foreign and domestic multinational firms have high shares of non-routine tasks and tasks requiring personal...