In a travel mode choice context, we use survey data to construct and test the significance of five individual specific latent variables – environmental preferences, safety, comfort, convenience and flexibility - postulated to be important for modal choice. Whereas the construction of the...

Paternalism, merit goods and specific egalitarianism are concepts we sometimes meet in the literature. The thing in common is that the policy maker does not fully respect the consumer sovereignty principle and design policies according to some other criterion than individuals’ preferences....

The issue of lowering or restructuring payroll taxes in order to relieve the situation for the unemployed, and in particular unskilled workers, is a topical question on the political agenda across the European countries. This paper examines the potential effects of altered payroll taxes on...

The paper examines whether a worker's sick absence behaviour influences the risk of becoming unemployed. Swedish panel data are used to estimate the relationship between the incidence and duration of sick leave and subsequent unemployment. The results indicate that an increase in the number of...

In their role as agenda setters and implementers of political decisions, bureaucrats potentially have the power to influence decisions in their own favor. It is however difficult to empirically test whether bureaucrats actually are involved in such actions. In this paper we suggest and apply a...

This study tests for strategic competition in public spending on childcare and primary education, and care for the elderly, using panel data on Swedish municipalities over 1996-2005. The high degree of decentralization in the organization of the public sector implies that Swedish data is highly...

When dealing with time series that are integrated of order one, the concept of cointegration becomes crucial for the specification of a model. Using the best available tests, one can reduce the probability of estimating econometric models that are misspecified. This paper investigates the small...

This paper focuses on three issues. First, it analyses the increasing inequality of wealth in Sweden in terms of percentile age and birth cohort differences. Second, it discusses mobility of wealth as a function of age, length of the transition period, the magnitude of quantile differences, and...

Earlier studies estimating the demand for local public services by means of the median voter model have typically assumed exogenous regressors and static set-ups. Furthermore, the commonly used log-linear specification of the demand function has in most cases not been supported by a well-defined...

In 1980, seven out of the seventeen Spanish regions were devolved education spending responsibility. Using a difference-in-differences approach, which I show to be particularly credible in this context, I evaluate the long term effect of this reform on human capital. I find no robust evidence to...