What Hides Behind the Rate of Unemployment? Micro Evidence from Norway

Building on a complete account of registered unemployment spells in Norway, we study how the composition of unemployment has developed over the last ten years. The total volume of unemployment has become more unequally distributed than before, but it is difficult to identify the ‘losers’ in terms of observed characteristics. There are no signs of low-education workers doing systematically worse. The most conspicuous change with respect to observed characteristics is that the relative outflow rates for older workers have deteriorated sharply.

Organisational Change, Absenteeism and Welfare Dependency

In this report the authors show that recent attempts to reorganise and cut costs in the Norwegian health care and social services sectors have had the unintended side effects of raising the level of sickness absence and disability among the employees, and that these effects have persisted several years after completion of the reorganisation processes. Since a substantial proportion of the resulting costs are external to the decision-makers, we suspect that the pace of change may have been excessively high. Changes that were efficient from each service provider’s point of view may have been inefficient from a social and a public-finance point of view.Absenteeism; hazard rate model; NPMLE

Genetiske effekter og flokkstruktur hos rein

Den betydelige genetiske forskjellen mellom villrein og tamrein kan derfor forklares ut ifra en seleksjon for større kalver innen tamreindrifta

Educating Children of Immigrants: Closing the Gap in Norwegian Schools

Children of immigrant parents constitute a growing share of school cohorts in many OECD countries, and their educational performance is vital for successful social and economic integration. This paper examines educational outcomes of first and second generation non- OECD immigrants in Norway. We show that children of immigrants, and particularly those born outside Norway, are much more likely to leave school early than native children. Importantly, this gap shrunk sharply over the past two decades and second generation immigrants are now rapidly catching up with the educational performance of natives. For childhood immigrants, upper secondary completion rates decline with age at arrival, with a particularly steep gradient after age seven. Finally, we find that immigrant-native attainment gaps disappear when we condition on grade points from compulsory school.immigrant children, educational attainment, school performance

Unemployment Duration, Incentives and Institutions - A Micro-Econometric Analysis Based on Scandinavian Data

Based on a combined register database for Norwegian and Swedish unemployment spells, we use the ‘between-countries-variation’ in the unemployment insurance systems to identify causal effects. The elasticity of the job hazard rate with respect to the benefit replacement ratio is around -1.0 in Norway and -0.5 in Sweden. The limited benefit duration period in Sweden has a large positive impact on the hazard rate, despite generous renewal options through participation in labour market programs. Compulsory program participation seems to operate as a ‘stick’, rather than a ‘carrot’, and is therefore an efficient tool for counteracting moral hazard problems in the benefit system.Unemployment spells; unemployment compensation; non-parametric duration analysis.

Disability in the Welfare State: An Unemployment Problem in Disguise?

Economies with low unemployment often have high disability rates. In Norway, the permanent disability insurance rolls outnumber registered unemployment by four to one. Based on administrative register data matched with firms' financial statements and closure data collected from bankruptcy proceedings, we show that a large fraction of Norwegian disability insurance claims can be directly attributed to job displacement and other adverse shocks to employment opportunities. For men, we estimate that job loss more than doubles the risk of entry to permanent disability and that displacements account for fully 28 percent of all new disability insurance claims. We conclude that unemployment and disability insurance are close substitutes.disability, displacement, social insurance, employment opportunities

Taxonomy and origin of reindeer

Reindeer and caribou was probably the key species for the human immigration and colonization in the Arctic and sub-Arctic by the retreat of the ice in the last glacial period. The close connection between human and reindeer has contributed to great interest and variation in reindeer taxonomy and origin. Through the history several both species, subspecies and types of reindeer and caribou have been described. The early taxonomy of the species is marked by comparisons of individual specimen using traits as body size, skin colour or antler formations - characteristics known to be highly variable and subjected to environmental and nutritional level. During the mid 1900s the taxonomy was more based on variation of morphological traits among populations by analysing a large series of specimens representative of the various geographic populations and a consensus of classification of several subspecies, all belonging to the same species, evolved. During late 1900 the development of modern molecular techniques procured tools for revealing genetic structure of populations reflecting different origin and isolation rather than environmental influences. The genetic structure revealed a major genetic dichotomy between American woodland caribou on the one hand and all other types of reindeer and caribou on the other which gave evidence that the ancestors of present woodland caribou had survived and evolved in ice free refugium south to the glacier in North America and the ancestors of all other types of reindeer and caribou had evolved separated from these in refugium in Eurasia and Beringia. The ancestors of present reindeer in Scandinavia appear furthermore to have evolved from different populations separated during the last glaciation period and the colonization and origin of present wild and domestic reindeer will be discussed in this perspective.Taksonomi og opprinnelse til reinAbstract in Norwegian / Sammendrag: Rein og caribou har hatt stor betydning for det moderne menneskets utvikling og kolonisering av nordlige Eurasia og Amerika etter siste istid. Den nære sammenhengen mellom mennesker og rein har bidratt til stor interesse og variasjon i oppfatningen av reinens taksonomi og opprinnelse. Et utall av både arter, underarter og raser av rein er beskrevet opp gjennom historien. Tidlig taksonomi av rein bar preg av å være basert på enkeltobservasjoner og på morfologiske karakterer som kroppsstørrelse, pelsfarge og størrelse og form på gevir, karakterer som i stor grad påvirkes av miljø og næringsforhold. Først på midten av 1900 tallet ble taksonomien i større grad basert på ulike morfologiske trekk som viste variasjon mellom bestander av rein, og en fikk bl.a. en forståelse av at alle underarter og former av rein og caribou tilhørte samme art. Med utviklingen av den moderne molekylærbiologien på slutten av 1900-tallet fikk en tilgang til verktøy som avdekket genetiske strukturer som reflekterer ulik opprinnelse og utvikling mer enn miljømessig påvirkning. Den genetiske strukturen som ble avdekket, viste liten overensstemmelse med oppdelingen i underarter som var basert på morfologiske trekk. Molekylærgenetiske struktur viser et hovedskille mellom amerikansk woodland caribou på den ene siden og all annen rein og caribou på den andre siden, noe som reflekterer at forfedrene til woodland caribou levde og utviklet seg i isfrie områder sør for iskanten i Nord-Amerika, mens forfedrene til andre typer rein levde atskilt fra disse i isfrie områder i Eurasia og Beringia. Forfedrene til dagens rein i Fennoskandia syntes også å ha utviklet seg fra atskilte bestander av rein som kan føres tilbake til slutten av siste istid. Innvandring og opprinnelse til dagens vill- og tamrein i Fennoskandia vil bli belyst i dette perspektiv

The Sick Pay Trap

In most countries, employers are financially responsible for sick pay during an initial period of a worker's absence spell, after which the public insurance system covers the bill. Based on a quasi-natural experiment in Norway, where pay liability was removed for pregnancy-related absences, we show that firms' absence costs significantly affect employees' absence behavior. However, by restricting pay liability to the initial period of the absence spell, firms are discouraged from letting long-term sick workers back into work, since they then face the financial risk associated with subsequent relapses. We show that this disincentive effect is statistically and economically significant.absenteeism, social insurance, experience rating, multivariate hazard rate models

Wage Formation, Regional Migration and Local Labour Market Tightness

Economic theory predicts that local labour market tightness affects local wage setting as well as individuals’ migration decisions. But how should we measure local labour market tightness? In this paper we show that the common practice of using the local rate of unemployment as the tightness indicator may be misplaced. Instead, we propose a human capital adjusted outflow rate from unemployment that can be computed on the basis of micro register data. This outflow rate performs better than traditional measures of regional labour market conditions in panel data analyses of regional wages and interregional migration.Regional wages; interregional migration; labour market tightness