This paper is concerned with the labor market experience of Swedish youths during the 1980s and the 1990s. The first objective is to portray early economic attainment among young Swedes. The second objective of the paper is to examine the impact of labor market programs on youth employment. We...

This paper investigates the connection between the Swedish wage profile of net job creation and Autor, Levy, and Murnane's (2003) proposed substitutability between routine tasks and technology. We first show that between 1975 and 2005, Sweden exhibited a pattern of job polarization with...

Based on longitudinal data covering periods before and after the major Swedish tax reform in 1991 a difference-in-difference approach is used to estimate the effects on hours of work of the cuts in the income tax. The results show that women increased their hours more than men did. If there is...

This paper evaluates the tax reforms carried out in Sweden between 1980 and 1991. We use a recently developed nonparametric labor supply function to account for the behavorial responses of the taxed individuals. We decompose the tax reform to study how the separate components influence hours of...

We impose a horizontal equity restriction on the problem of finding the optimal utilitarian tax mix. The horizontal equity constraint requires that individuals with the same ability have to pay the same amount of taxes regardless of their preferences for leisure. Contrary to normal findings, we...

This paper reconsiders the effects of dividend taxation. Particular attention is paid to the form of the “equity trap”, that is, the extent to which cash paid to the shareholders must be taxed as dividends. Our analysis shows that Sinn’s (1991) criticism of the well-known King and...

This paper studies optimal unemployment benefit levels and optimal proportional income tax rates over the business cycle. Previous research suggests that policy makers should make unemployment insurance (UI) dependent on the business cycle because the UI system can be used to smooth consumption...

In an article in International Tax and Public Finance, Peter Birch Sørensen (2005) gives an in-depth account of the new Norwegian Shareholder Tax, which allows the shareholders a deduction for an imputed risk-free rate of return. Sørensen’s positive evaluation appears as reasonable for a...

This paper examines how the distortions caused by dividend taxation depend on whether or not shareholders can recover their original equity injections without being subject to the dividend tax. We point out the alternative assumptions in the literature on this, and we compare two different tax...