The Finnish unemployment rose in the early 1990's from three to eighteen percent in four years. Unemployment has then decreased to the average European level, being 8.5 percent in October 2002. In this paper, we describe the shocks leading to this unforeseen increase in unemployment. We then...

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...

In this paper we evaluate the effects of a regional experiment that reduced payroll-taxes by 3–6 percentage points for three years in Northern Finland. 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...

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...

This paper studies the effects of school choice on segregation. We analyze the effect of a reform in Stockholm that changed the admission system of public upper secondary schools. Before the year 2000, students had priority to the school situated closest to where they lived, but from the fall of...

Existing evidence of inequality aversion relies on data from class-room experiments where subjects face hypothetical questions. This paper estimates the magnitude of inequality aversion using representative survey data, with questions related to the real-economy situations the respondents face....

Many authors have recently suggested that the heterogeneity in the quality of early education may be one of the key mechanisms underlying the intergenerational persistence of earnings. This paper estimates the effect of a major educational reform on the intergenerational income mobility in...

The Finnish comprehensive school reform replaced the old two-track school system with a uniform nine-year comprehensive school and significantly reduced the degree of heterogeneity in the Finnish primary and secondary education. We estimate the effect of this reform on the test scores in the...

This paper evaluates the labour market effects of the introduction of the polytechnic education system in Finland. The polytechnic reform gradually transformed former vocational colleges into polytechnics. Since the timing of the reform differed across schools, we can compare the performance of...

We use lifetime job histories from the pension records to evaluate changes in job stability in Finland between 1963 and 2004. We specify a duration model and estimate the effects of elapsed duration, age, and calendar time on the hazard of job ending using individual-level panel data spanning...