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During the industrialization period, the rate of workplace-related accidents increased. Because of the lack of public insurance, mutual health insurance societies became the main providers of workplace accident insurance among workers. Due to large differences in accident risk, health insurance societies were potentially exposed to the risk of adverse selection, since they employed equal pricing for all members regardless of risk profile. This article investigates the impact of workplace accident risk on health insurance selection and outcomes. We employ household budget surveys encompassing urban workers in Sweden during the early twentieth century. We find evidence for a redistribution from low- to high-risk-exposed workers, as workplace accident risk had a significant and positive impact on receiving health insurance benefits, also when controlling for a variety of factors. Workers exposed to greater risks in the workplace were more likely to have health insurance but did not pay higher premiums. The redistribution from low- to high-risk-exposed workers was largely accepted and viewed as an act of solidarity between workers. Given that health insurance societies were aware of this redistribution, we argue for the presence of informed, rather than adverse, selection.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of immigration on the labour market outcomes of low-educated natives (i.e. residents without a university diploma). Using the labour market competition theory, which argues that the labour market effects of natives depend on the skill set of immigrants, the paper addresses whether immigrants are complementary to or substitutes for native workers.Design/methodology/approachLongitudinal matched employer–employee data on Sweden are used to estimate how low-educated natives, in regions experiencing the greatest influx of refugees from the Balkan wars, responded to this supply shock with regard to real wages, employment and job mobility between 1990 and 2003.FindingsFirst, the analysis shows that low-educated native workers respond to the arrival of immigrants with an increase in real wages. Second, although employment prospects in general worsened for low-skilled workers in most regions, this is not attributable to the regions experiencing the largest supply shock. Third, there are indications that low-skilled natives in immigration-rich regions are more likely to change workplace, particularly in combination with moving upwards in the wage distribution.Originality/valueRather than seeing an emergence of the commonly perceived displacement mechanism when an economy is subject to a supply shock, the regional findings suggest that high inflows of immigrants tend to induce a mechanism that pulls native workers upwards in the wage distribution. This is important, as the proportion of immigrants is seldom evenly distributed within a nation.

Hong and Kao (2004) proposed a class of general applicable wavelet-based tests for serial correlation of unknown form in the residuals from a panel regression model. The tests can be applied to both static and dynamic panel models. Their test, however, is computationally difficult to implement, and simulation studies show that the test has poor small-sample properties. In this paper, we extend Gençay’s (2010) time-series test for serial correlation to panel data case. Our new test is also wavelet based and maintains the advantages of the Hong and Kao (2004) test, but it is much simpler and easier to implement. Furthermore, simulation results show that our test has quicker convergence rate and hence better small-sample properties, compared to Hong and Kao (2004) test. We also compare our test with several other existing tests for series correlation, and our test has in general better statistical properties in terms of both size and power.

This article analyses if and when workers affected by economic destruction in the form of establishment closures move to more productive or newly started establishments in the region, become self-employed, leave the region or become displaced. Results from multinominal probit models show that the majority of these workers face destructive employment outcomes from a Schumpeterian point of view compared to a matched sample of workers not subject to a closure. However, we do find indications of a creative destruction as a small, albeit significant, share become employed in young establishments. Different types of human capital influence the likelihood of triggering positive or negative regional outcomes. While higher education significantly decreases the risk for unemployment, high-income earners more often become engaged in creative outcomes. Firm tenure increases the likelihood of becoming employed in younger establishments. There are significant spatial differences where metropolitan regions excel as loci of creative change, whereas smaller and peripheral regions face far less creative outcomes of economic transformation.

This paper presents a new approach to the measurement of the effects of spatial mismatch that takes advantage of matched employer-employee administrative data integrated with a person-specific job accessibility measure, as well as demographic and neighborhood characteristics. The basic hypothesis is that if spatial mismatch is present, then improved accessibility to appropriate jobs should shorten the duration of unemployment. We focus on lower-income workers with strong labor force attachment searching for employment after being subject to a mass layoff - thereby focusing on a group of job searchers that are plausibly searching for exogenous reasons. We construct person-specific measures of job accessibility based upon an empirical model of transport modal choice and network travel-time data, giving variation both across neighborhoods in nine metropolitan areas, as well as across neighbors. Our results support the spatial mismatch hypothesis. We find that better job accessibility significantly decreases the duration of joblessness among lower-paid displaced workers. Blacks, females, and older workers are more sensitive to job accessibility than other subpopulations.

Family firms are often considered characteristically different from non-family firms. However, our understanding of family firms suffers from an inability to identify them in total population data; information is rarely available regarding owners, their kinship, and their involvement in firm governance. We present a method for identifying domiciled family firms using register data; this method offers greater accuracy than previous methods. We apply this method to Swedish data concerning firm ownership, governance, and kinship from 2004 to 2010. We find that the family firm is a significant organizational form, contributing over one third of all employment and gross domestic product (GDP). Family firms are common in most industries and range in size. Furthermore, we find that, compared to private non-family firms, family firms have fewer total assets, employment, and sales and carry higher solidity, although family firms are more profitable. These differences diminish with firm size. We conclude that the term “family firm” includes a large variety of firms, and we call for increased attention to their heterogeneity.

Reinsurance is a vital financial device for enhancing underwriting capacity, ceding risks, and mitigating financial distress. By supplying financial resources and services, reinsurance can facilita ...

We review the literature on public sector outsourcing to explore if the theoretical predictions from the incomplete contracts literature hold up to recent empirical evidence. Guided by theory, we arrange services according to the type and magnitude of their contractibility problems. The empirical studies point at rather favourable outsourcing outcomes, in terms of costs and quality, for services without severe contracting problems. The picture is more mixed for services with tougher contracting problems, with the weight of the evidence in favour of public provision. This difference between services is largely in line with the property-rights framework and theories of incomplete contracts., JEL L33 - Comparison of Public and Private Enterprises and Nonprofit Institutions; Privatization; Contracting OutD23 - Organizational Behavior; Transaction Costs; Property RightsH11 - Structure, Scope, and Performance of Government

Weak economic growth is a contributing factor behind many banking crises. In this paper, we test whether banking crises cause long-term institutional change aimed at improving macroeconomic performance and thus indirectly reduce the risk of future crises. Our dataset consists of 22 developed and 34 developing countries covering the period from 1985 to 2009. The results show that banking crises cause institutional change if GDP growth is below potential growth during the crisis. Approximately 40% of the change in institutional quality during the considered period occurred after a banking crisis. These results hold for both developed and developing countries.

This article explores the development of market integration within the Baltic Sea region and with England, from the 1840s to the late 1880s. It exploits two new datasets on grain prices. The degree of market integration is estimated using a wavelet variant of dynamic factor analysis that takes account of both time and distance. Additionally, we use the London corn market as the benchmark for the degree of market integration. Our results show that the role of distance disappeared in the wheat and rye, but not in the oats and barley trade, as the Baltic Sea Region became integrated into the Atlantic economy.

The impact of the housing crash on household mobility is theoretically ambiguous. Households that have little or negative equity are less likely to move because the proceeds from the sale of the home may not be large enough to pay off the original mortgage and provide a sufficient down payment on a new home. On the other hand, at sufficiently negative levels of home equity, household mobility may actually increase through the foreclosure channel. In this paper we develop and empirically test a model that incorporates both of these mechanisms. Our empirical results – based on data for Florida homeowners – provide evidence of a non-monotonic relationship between home equity and mobility. Although default-induced mobility did increase following the financial crisis, this increase did little to offset the substantial decline in voluntary moves due to home equity lock-in; we find that on net, household mobility declined by roughly 25% in our sample because of reductions in equity.

This study develops estimates of expected loss severities on mortgage exposures using data from Florida during the Great Recession. This paper marks the first attempt at addressing sample selectivity in the context of loss models. We also construct measures of home equity that are more accurate than those employed in previous studies. We find that failing to address sample selection and the use of noisy equity measures in loss models can bias loss estimates significantly. We also find significantly higher loss severities and a greater sensitivity of loss severity to equity than what previous studies report.

We employ cost-of-living surveys, business archives, and firm data to examine the impact of the compulsory pension on the demand for life insurance in Sweden from 1884 to 1914—a period that covers the implementation of the first public compulsory old-age pension reform and the take-off of industry life insurance. As predicted on the basis of the contemporary literature on crowding-out effects, we find that the compulsory pension reduced the demand for life insurance. Our panel-data analysis of lapse rates on insurance policies shows a significant crowding-out effect of pension payments. We conclude that the introduction of the general compulsory pension had a crowding-out effect on households’ holdings of insurance policies.

We test the possibility that exchange rates from nine developed countries have a unit root against the alternate possibility that they are fractionally integrated. Theoretically, exchange rates are only expected to follow a random walk under restrictive assumptions. However, most traditional unit root tests cannot reject a unit root in exchange rates, and time series tests that allow for fractional integration have given inconclusive results. To increase the power of the test of the integration order we develop two panel data tests of the fractional integration order. Monte Carlo simulations show that these tests are correctly sized and have relatively high power compared to other similar tests. Moreover, our empirical results show that we can reject a unit root in exchange rates with a high probability, but the integration order is close to one. This indicates that exchange rates are mean-reverting, although the reversion is slow, resulting in long swings.

China’s unbalanced growth strategy has seemingly fostered growing inter-regional growth disparities and there is little evidence of wealth trickling down from richer provinces to poorer provinces. Standard convergence tests, however, may be ill specified to detect underlying long-term growth trends in small samples due to the pronounced and frequent inter-regional short-term fluctuations. Our paper suggests a novel approach to distinguish between these long-term growth trends and short-term fluctuations. Based on provincial data from 1978 to 2009, our results indicate that China’s provinces only diverge over the shortterm. Over the long term, provinces cluster into two converging growth clubs.

Using a novel dataset of regional GDP per worker from 1860 to 2009, this paper analyzes communalities in regional long-term growth trajectories for 24 Swedish regions. Wavelet Analysis and Principal Component Analysis are used to decompose regional growth trajectories and assess the extent that regional growth patterns share common trends and cyclical properties. The study found that regional growth trends show strong common features among groups of regions in Sweden. Natural-resource-rich regions benefited from the First Industrial Revolution. Contrary to regional development in many other European economies, a growth surge in Sweden later benefited virtually the whole country during the Second Industrial Revolution. The countrywide trend of growth slowed in the 1970s when the metropolitan regions became the main growth engines. In mid- and short-term cyclical movements, regions display more heterogeneous growth patterns, and we find evidence of mid-term, sequential lead–lag patterns in regional growth, especially between urban cores and the periphery.

It is an established fact that there are high levels of employment volatility in the US. Despite the importance of employer-provided benefits in the US health insurance system the impact of prior job instability on one's future ability to obtain insurance coverage is not well understood. This article finds a negative relationship between the volatility of a worker's employment and her likelihood of receiving firm-provided health insurance. Previous employment volatility reduces each of the four factors necessary to receive such insurance: a worker's subsequent chances of getting a job, her chances of getting a job in a firm that offers coverage, her chances of staying with the firm long enough to become eligible for coverage and her ability to take up insurance if offered. The most important impact is on the last: her ability to take up insurance if offered. Lack of employment is not the only, and not even the largest, barrier to individual coverage under this system. This finding has important policy imp...

Campbell and Mankiw's (1990) lambda model has frequently been used to estimate the fraction of rule of thumb consumers (i.e., consumers who do not smooth their consumption). However, the present note shows theoretically, as well as with a numerical illustration, that existing empirical applications of the lambda model imply a systematic underestimation of this fraction. The reason is that per capita values instead of aggregate values (which the model is designed for) are used.

We exploit information on ownership, management and kinship to study the representation of women in top management teams in Swedish family and non-family firms among domiciled limited liability fir ...

This paper presents a closed form consumption function for an individual when his utility depends both on his own current and previous consumption and on the consumption by his relevant others. Given this model, I argue that we can introduce an alternative definition of marginal propensity to consume (MPC) in addition to the traditional definition. This alternative definition can be called the individual’s total MPC, which I show is smaller than the traditional MPC.

By using hypothetical choice experiments, this paper presents evidence that individuals’ concern for relative consumption depends on their relative consumption. Individuals with consumption levels above society's average consumption level tend to have, in general, lower concern for relative consumption. This supports Duesenberry's [Duesenberry, J.S., 1949. Income, Saving, and the Theory of Consumer Behavior. Havard Univeristy Press, Cambridge, MA] notion that people are more concerned with upward social comparison than with downward social comparison.

Young individuals, taking the locational choices made by their altruistic parents as given, decide whether or not to acquire skills. The use of location-specific word-of-mouth communication in the transmission of information about (skilled) job opportunities implies that the local social environment partly determines an individual's expected returns to education. Stratified equilibria, when they exist, are characterised by low intergenerational social mobility and inefficient use of talent. In addition, the equilibrium responses to factors that generally encourage education may, in stratified outcomes, be highly asymmetric across socio-economic groups. Non-stratified equilibria are likely to be destabilised by measures that encourage education.

This paper studies the long-term impact of entrepreneurship education and training in high school on entrepreneurial entry, performance, and survival. Using propensity score matching, we compare three Swedish cohorts from Junior Achievement Company Program (JACP) alumni with a matched sample of similar individuals and follow these for up to 16 years after graduation. We find that while JACP participation increases the long-term probability of starting a firm as well as entrepreneurial incomes, there is no effect on firm survival.

A simple N-country specific-factor-type model with imperfectly mobile labour is developed. It is shown that the effects of country-specific productivity shocks hitting a small country have fundamentally asymmetric effects: A positive shock will be accommodated by a moderate wage increase and sizeable in-migration, whereas a negative shock will be accommodated by a significant decrease in wages and moderate out-migration. It is argued that the results of the model are consistent with the recent Irish experience. The welfare effects of small economic fluctuations are also discussed. (C) 2002 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The importance of risk characteristics of human capital for the design of tax and education policy is explored. Wages are uncertain and education, while increasing the expected wage, may increase or decrease wage variance. The government has strong reasons to encourage human capital formation in the latter case, partly due to the insurance effect of human capital, and partly due to the way the individuals-under a plausible restriction on 'prudence'-respond to changes in risk. The analysis is illustrated using two models of education: one where education helps the individuals make better occupational choices, and a standard risk-augmented Becker-type model.

In this paper, insurers' credibility problems explain contracting, co-operation, and regulation in the insurance industry. First, it is noted that cheating by policyholders may be eliminated if the insurer withholds compensation on the basis of detecting careless behaviour with high enough probability. Then, assuming that care taken is imperfectly observable and non-contractible, the problem that insurers may deceive policyholders is addressed. In a repeated game, insurers' building a reputation for being generous can sustain an efficient outcome. Finally, intra-industry co-operation is considered; it is shown that the industry's monitoring care and "fair" compensation, while sustaining monopolistic pricing, mitigates negative credibility externalities. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

Globalization is supposed to increase the mobility of highly skilled labor and to reduce governments' scope for redistribution. We show that this increases the private incentives for education and may decrease, but may also increase, the government's incentives to provide education subsidies in a framework in which education investment is risky. Globalization shifts the cost of these subsidies to the less skilled. For the welfare implications of globalization the availability of private insurance is crucial. Welfare unambiguously increases if such markets work.

in Undetermined This paper investigates hypotheses related to efficiency and price uniformity in online competing auctions based on two theoretical predictions from Peters and Severinov [Peters, M., Severinov, S., 2006. Internet auctions with many traders. Journal of Economic Theory 130, 220–245]. The investigation is conducted using a large and ideal data set for online competing train ticket auctions, and the findings support the theoretical predictions in large parts.

A two‐period, career‐concerns model with symmetric information but uncertainty about each worker’s ability is analyzed. Contracts are unobservable, but incomes are observable. It is shown that effort is distorted upward by contracts being unobservable and that the distortion depends positively on turnover.

Contains fulltext : 158903.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access) China’s banking sector is dominated by four distinct organizational forms: policy banks (PBs), state-owned commercial banks (SOCBs), joint stock commercial banks (JSCBs), and rural credit cooperatives (RCCs). Economic analyses have especially focused on the development of bank efficiency and profitability over time. The equally important question, which of China’s banking institutions promote economic growth, has not been explored using macroeconomic data. Our study uses a novel data set covering the period 1997–2008 and employs Granger causality tests to estimate the finance–growth nexus of each of these bank types. Our results show that SOCBs and RCCs do not Granger-cause GDP growth and that SOCBs even have a negative effect on manufacturing growth. By contrast, PBs and JSCBs promote economic growth. 12 januari 2016

A simple principal-agent model with bilateral asymmetric information and common values is developed. The agent(s) has private information about his characteristics but does not knowhow these affect outcomes. The principal knows how the characteristics translate into outcomes, but does not observe the characteristics. It is shown that equilibrium contracts aresimple in being designednot to reveal the agent's characteristics. When the agent knows howsome of his characteristics affect the outcome, contracts will be differentiated with respect to precisely those characteristics. An application to the use of genetic information is considered.

A two-sector model with sector-dependent disability risks is presented. Working in the low- risk sector requires skills that can be obtained by investments in education. Moral hazard precludes full insurance. The labour force allocation is responsive to the incentives created by a social insurance system. The rationale for intervention lies in the government's power to cross-subsidize between the sectors, and it is demonstrated how the responsiveness of the labour force allocation limits cross-subsidization. The second-best policy is time-inconsistent. The consistent equilibrium is explored and is argued to provide weak incentives to reduce risks. ties to live off their own work. Recently, social insurance has come under scrutiny owing to increased pressures to reduce government expenditures. One critical view that has been put forward is that a public system that pools work- ers with different occupations may cause a significant loss of welfare. Since different occupations are associated with different levels of risk, it is argued that pooled systems, while adhering to a general notion of fairness, cause an inefficient allocation of the labour force. Put in simple terms, pooled systems implicitly subsidize risky activities and thereby promote excessive undertaking of such activities. The purpose of this study is to investigate the problem of social insurance design in a setting where workers can influence the disability risks they are exposed to by choosing a low-risk occupation. The model presented has two sectors, a high-risk sector and a low-risk sector. Working in the low-risk sector requires some kind of costly investment which we represent as a choice of 'education', although it is clear that any investment undertaken by the work- ers-e.g. migration investments-leads to precisely the same trade-offs. The workers choose which sector to enter in response to the incentives created by the social insurance system. This allows an analysis of the trade-off between the efficiency of the labour force allocation and distributive concerns, as well as a characterization of optimal social insurance under various assumptions about the government's ability to cross-subsidize and to affect occupational choices. Following the seminal work by Diamond and Mirrlees (1978), a moral-hazard problem precludes full insurance and creates a second-best environment. Our framework is similar in some respects to that of Whinston (1983). In a pure moral hazard framework Whinston shows that optimal contracts cross- subsidize in favour of more accident-prone workers to an extent that makes them better off than less accident-prone workers; on this point we extend Whinston's result by identifying the exact redistributive rule and by providing an interpretation of the result as an instance of 'tagging'. Whinston further

It is shown that decision makers guided by Popperian epistemology will have a preference for transparency, even in situations where standard economic theory provides no rationale for such a preference. This provides a Popperian resolution of the Ellsberg paradox, and a rationale for suspicion in experiments as well as in economic life.

A simple two-period model with two polluters is analyzed. They emit a homogeneous hazardous substance, and they are given tradable permits to pollute. The social planner issues permits and tries to learn the cost of reducing pollution by observing the quantity of permits traded in the first period. It is shown that although efficient trade is prevented by strategic considerations by the polluters, the planner learns something from observing only quantities. Comparisons are made between this approach and that of mechanism design, and it is concluded that the latter is superior in theory, but sensitive to collusion by the firms.

We study the job training provided under the US Workforce Investment Act (WIA) to adults and dislocated workers in two states. Our substantive contributions center on impacts estimated non-experimentally using administrative data. These impacts compare WIA participants who do and do not receive training. In addition to the usual impacts on earnings and employment, we link our state data to the Longitudinal Employer Household Dynamics (LEHD) data at the U.S. Census Bureau, which allows us to estimate impacts on the characteristics of the firms at which participants find employment. We find moderate positive impacts on employment, earnings and desirable firm characteristics for adults, but not for dislocated workers. Our primary methodological contribution consists of assessing the value of the additional conditioning information provided by the LEHD relative to the data available in state Unemployment Insurance (UI) earnings records. We find that value to be zero.

This paper develops a model of taxation with asymmetric information between the worker and the employer as well as between the worker and the tax collector. We show that if the informational asymmetry in the labour market is solved through signaling, implications for taxation are strong. Taxing the signal directly, as well as imposing a progressive tax on income, are both shown to have favourable welfare consequences locally. In contrast to the results obtained for the progressive income tax, we show that taxing the signal directly is likely to reduce other distortions. The optimal tax fully exploits the possibilities to tax the signal directly before using progression.

Mutual and stock insurers have coexisted and competed against each other in insurance markets for centuries. In this article, we examine the risk management strategies and underwriting profitability of the different organizational forms in Sweden's property fire insurance market between 1903 and 1939. We demonstrate that stock insurers acted as intermediaries between policyholders and reinsurers to operate effectively in the potentially high-risk segments of the fire insurance market. In contrast, nationwide mutual insurers kept larger reserves to balance fluctuations in claims experiences, while local insurance pools relied on social obligation and trust to mobilize capital after adverse fire events.

In the wake of the recent housing and financial crisis, many have argued that consumers are defaulting on their mortgage for strategic reasons, either because they are “underwater” or to preserve access to credit from other types of debt products, in order to maintain their consumption of other essential goods. In this paper, we examine the extent to which nonprime mortgage borrowers prioritize payments on their monthly mortgage over credit card debt obligations over a 9-year period (2001–09). Before the recent financial crisis, our default order data suggest that consumers were eight times more likely to prioritize payments on mortgage debt over credit card payments. As of late 2008, in contrast, the similar consumers were just as likely to default on mortgage debt as on credit card debt. Our results reveal that important explanations for the observed changes in the pecking order of defaults include: strategic mortgage default behavior among consumers with low and negative housing equity, illiquidity in the form of available credit, the rising costs of servicing mortgage debt, and lowered underwriting standards and the greater penetration of nontraditional mortgage products. These results support the importance of strategic consumer behavior, but also emphasize that the changes in the pecking order of defaults have come about because of ability-to-pay considerations.

Innovation in the U.S. economy is about employing and rewarding highly talented workers to produce new products. Using unique longitudinal matched employer-employee data, this paper makes a key connection between talent and firms in markets with risky product innovations. We show that software firms that operate in product markets with highly skewed returns to innovation, or high variance payoffs, are more likely to attract and pay for star workers. Thus, firms in high variance product markets pay more up-front--in starting salaries--to attract and motivate star employees, because if these star workers produce home-run innovations, the firm's winnings will be huge. However, we also find these same firms pay highly for loyalty: star workers that stay with a firm have much higher earnings in firms with high variance product market payoffs. The large effects on earnings are robust to the inclusion of a wide range of controls for both workers and firm characteristics. One key control is that we also show that in firms that have actually hit home runs, with high revenues, the rewards for star talent are even greater. We also find that the dispersion of earnings is higher within firms with high variance product payoffs.

The striking geographical concentration of economic activities suggests that there are substantial benefits to agglomeration. However, the nature of those benefits remains unclear. In this paper we take advantage of a new dataset to quantify the role of one of the main contenders - the matching of workers and jobs. Using individual level data for two large US states we show that thicker urban labour markets are associated with more assortative matching between workers and firms. Another critical condition is required for this to generate higher productivity: complementarity of worker and firm quality in the production function. Using establishment level productivity regressions, we show that such complementarity is found in our data. Putting together the production and matching relationships, we show that production complementarity and assortative matching is an important source of the urban productivity premium.

This paper considers education investment and public education policy in closed and open economies with an extortionary government. The extortionary government in a closed economy chooses an education policy in order to overcome a hold-up problem of time-consistent taxation similar to benevolent governments. The two types of government differ in their education policies if highly productive labor is mobile. Extortionary governments’ incentives for a policy that stimulates higher private education efforts vanish; instead they have incentives to prevent individuals from mobility-increasing education investment. Tax competition therefore reduces hold-up problems of time-consistent extortionary taxation, but introduces other distortions that reduce workers’ utility.

Tax competition between two countries is considered in a trade-and-location setting with differentiated products and monopolistic competition. There are two groups of workers, mobile ones and immobile ones. Taxes are used for producing a public good. It is shown that an equilibrium with mobile workers dispersed across countries is destabilised by increased taxes on these - and this is shown to be true also for perfectly coordinated tax increases. It is also shown that an agglomeration is taxable, and that increasing public spending may relax the tax pressure on immobile workers consistent with preserving an agglomeration for some levels of taxes.