Estimating Long-Term Consequences of Teenage Childbearing - An Examination of the Siblings Approach

One of the remedies to selection bias in estimates of the labour market consequences of teenage motherhood has been to estimate within-family effects. A major critique, however, is that heterogeneity within the family might still bias the estimates. Using a large Swedish dataset on biological sisters, I revisit the question of the consequences of teenage motherhood. My contribution is that I am able to control for heterogeneity within the family; I use gradepoint-averages at age 16, a pre-motherhood characteristic that differs across sisters within the same family. My findings confirm the presumption that within-family heterogeneity can result in biased within-family estimates. Moreover, my results show that when controlling for school performance, the siblings approach and a traditional cross section yield similar coefficients.Fertility; sibling models

Unemployment Insurance in Theory and Practice

A hallmark of modern labor economics is the close interplay between the development of theory, data sources and econometric testing. The evolution of the economic analysis of unemployment insurance provides a good illustration. New theoretical approaches, in particular job-search theory, have inspired a large amount of empirical research, some of it methodologically innovative and most of it highly relevant for economic policy. The paper presents a broad survey and an assessment of the economic analysis of unemployment insurance as it has evolved since the 1970s.

Labor Taxation in Search Equilibrium with Home Production

Conventional models of equilibrium unemployment typically imply that proportional taxes on labor earnings are neutral with respect to unemployment as long as the tax does not affect the replacement rate provided by unemployment insurance, i.e., unemployment benefits relative to after-tax earnings. When home production is an option, the conventional results may no longer hold. This paper uses a search equilibrium model with home production to examine the employment and welfare implications of labor taxes. The employment effect of a rise in a proportional tax is found to be negative for sufficiently low replacement rates, whereas it is ambiguous for moderate and high replacement rates. Numerical calibrations of the model indicate that employment generally falls when proportional labor taxes are raised. Progressive labor taxes increase labor market tightness but have ambiguous effects on search effort and employment.Home production, job search, unemployment, taxation

ANCSA Corporation Lands and the Dependent Indian Community Category of Indian Country

The demand for increased efficiency and patient-centered care has been influencing the development of healthcare in Sweden, and information technology has an important role in that process. Developing and implementing systems for public healthcare have proven to be a great challenge. One way to address this challenge is open innovation and co-creation. While there are a lot of studies focusing on innovation processes, there is little research regarding how technology is presented in the results. We have studied a co-creational workshop that focused on putting new perspectives on the use of information technology in healthcare. The workshop resulted in eight concepts which have been analyzed in terms of how technology is expressed. The results were categorized into implicit and explicit use of technology and this categorization indicates that the implicit use of technology is of the bricolage kind. By being both implicit and bricolage-like, the concepts hold qualities that make them more likely to be integrated into existing workplaces

Labor Taxation in Search Equilibrium with Home Production.

Conventional models of equilibrium unemployment typically imply that pro-portional taxes on labor earnings are neutral with respect to unemployment as long as the tax does not affect the replacement rate provided by unem-ployment insurance, i.e., unemployment benefits relative to after-tax earn-ings. When home production is an option, the conventional results may no longer hold. This paper uses a search equilibrium model with home pro-duction to examine the employment and welfare implications of labor taxes. The employment effect of a rise in a proportional tax is found to be negative for su¢ciently low replacement rates, whereas it is ambiguous for moderate and high replacement rates. Numerical calibrations of the model indicate that employment generally falls when proportional labor taxes are raised. Progressive labor taxes increase labor market tightness but have ambiguous e¤ects on search e¤ort and employment. The numerical calibrations indicate positive employment effects.

Does the Father Matter for the Time Children Spend in Child Care?

This paper analyses whether the fathers matter for the number of hours that their children spend in subsidized child care. More explicitly, we estimate two non-nested models of child care demand in Sweden. The dual care taker model allows both parents' labour supplies to vary and includes several personal characteristics of the father as well as for the mother. The single care taker model follows earlier research and assumes that the father's labour supply is fixed and exogenous to the family's child care demand. The parameter estimates indicate that several of the father's characteristics are associated with the time his child spends in child care. J-tests and bootstrap J-tests are performed to compare the models. The tests show that the single care taker model can be rejected in favour of the dual care taker model while the dual care taker model cannot be rejected in favour of the single care taker model.Child care demand; Subsidized child care; Dual care taker model

Optimal unemployment insurance design: time limits, monitoring, or workfare?

This paper analyses crucial design features of unemployment insurance (UI) policies. We examine three different means of improving the efficiency of UI: the duration of benefit payments, monitoring in conjunction with sanctions, and workfare. To that end we develop a quantitative model of equilibrium unemployment. The model features worker heterogeneity in preferences for leisure. The numerical analysis suggests that a system with monitoring and sanctions restores search incentives most effectively, since it brings additional incentives to search actively so as to avoid the sanction. Therefore, the UI provider can offer a more generous UI replacement rate in a system with monitoring and sanctions than in the other two systems. Workfare appears to be inferior to the other two systems.Unemployment insurance; search equilibrium; time limits; monitoring and sanctions; workfare

Temporary Work in Turbulent Times: The Swedish Experience

Sweden has experienced a substantial increase in temporary work over the 1990s, with most of the rise occurring during a severe macroeconomic recession with mass unemployment. By the early 1990s, workers on fixed-term contracts accounted for 10 percent of the number of employees; by the end of the decade they accounted for 16 percent. The paper presents the Swedish institutional setting, documents basic stylised facts about fixed-term contracts, and discusses the causes of their increased prevalence. Our analysis reveals that open-ended and temporary employment exhibit strikingly different cyclical behaviour with temporary employment being more volatile. A recession is associated with an initial decline in temporary employment followed by a sharp rise from the trough to the end of the recession. We argue that the severe recession of the 1990s is a major factor behind the rise in temporary work in Sweden. Adverse macroeconomic conditions make firms more prone to offer fixed-term contracts and workers more willing to accept them.Temporary jobs; Labour market dynamics; Unemployment