In this paper we investigate whether local governments react on the welfare benefit levels in neighboring jurisdictions when setting their own benefit levels. We solve the simultaneity problem arising from the welfare game by utilizing a policy intervention; more specifically, we use a centrally...

Recent literature on optimal nonlinear taxation has shown that in models with a single level of government public provision of private goods can help redistribution by mitigating self-selection constraints. The aim of the present paper is to extend the analysis to a fiscal federalism setting...

There is a rich literature analyzing the problems that will arise as the share of elderly and retired in the population increases in the near future. However, the locational decisions among the elderly as well as their implications in terms of taxes/transfers and of allocation of...

This paper provides a brief survey of the bootstrap and its use in econometrics. As an introduction, the paper gives a description of the basics of the method, with a special emphasis on boostrap testing. A fairly large amount of space is devoted to discuss why bootstrap tests provide...

The distributional consequences of commodity taxes have become more important as industrialized countries have started to raise more revenue using these taxes. In this paper the distributional consequences of commodity taxes are evaluated using both disposable income and total expenditure as...

This paper uses a panel of Swedish counties over the years 1988-99 to study the effects of unemployment on property crime rates. The period under study is characterized by great turbulence in the labor market - the variation in the unemployment rates is unprecedented in the second half of the...

This paper contributes to the recent debate about the estimated high partial adjustment coefficient in dynamic Taylor rules, commonly interpreted as deliberate interest rate smoothing on the part of the monetary authority. We argue that a high coefficient on the lagged interest rate term may be...

Recently, a voluminous literature estimating the taxable income elasticity has emerged as an important field in empirical public economics. However, to a large extent it is still unknown how the hourly wage rate, an important component of taxable income, reacts to changes in marginal tax rates....

One goal of the public employment service is to facilitate matching between unemployed job seekers and job vacancies; another goal is to monitor job search so as to bring search efforts among the unemployed in line with search requirements. The referral of job seekers to vacancies is one...