Search

This paper gives a comprehensive picture of job and worker flows for the entire Danish economy. We exploit a unique central administrative register encompassing all employees of all workplaces across all sectors throughout two business cycles. This enables us to broaden the focus of the previous literature about job and worker flows which has been concerned exclusively with larger workplaces, especially in the manufacturing sector. We find that manufacturing data underestimate the levels of flows in the other private sector industries as well as the role of small workplaces in the job and worker reallocation processes. As for the cyclicality of job and worker flows, the results of Davis and Haltiwanger are confirmed for the whole Danish economy and the manufacturing industry, but not for the private sector. Thus, the results are sensitive to the exclusion of the large public sector.

This paper is concerned with the relationship between class size and the student outcome length of time in post-compulsory schooling. Research on this topic has been problematic partly because omitted unobservables, like parents' incomes and education levels, are likely to be correlated with class size. Two potential ways to resolve this problem are to exploit either experimental or instrumental variation. In both cases, the methods require that the variation in both class size and the outcome should not be contaminated by other unobservable factors that affect the outcome - like family background. An alternative approach, which we pursue here, is to take advantage of variation in class size between siblings which allows unobservable family effects to be differenced out. Our aim is to provide estimates of the effect of class size and use these to conduct an evaluation of the costs and benefits of a reduction in class sizes.

The effects of pension programme incentives on retirement in Denmark are analysed in an option value framework. Using eligibility criteria and detailed entitlement rules for the five main publicly funded retirement programmes, we calculate social security wealth, one year pension accrual and forward-looking incentive measures. Estimation results from an option value analysis are used to simulate the expected outcome from a set of strategic reforms of retirement policy.

In Great Britain the move away from rented accommodation to owner occupation is leaving behind a large group of households with low incomes, wages and hours of work, and high housing costs, who are increasingly in receipt of welfare transfers. The disparity along all of these dimensions between renters and owner occupiers has continued to grow since the 1970’s.\ud \ud The relationship between housing costs, wages and transfer programmes is complex and yet plays an important part in determining the incentive to work for individuals in low income or high housing cost households. While it is true that many individuals who are in these categories are out of the labour force (retired, sick and disabled), there are many who are not and whose incentive to seek work, or to work harder if already in work, could be modified by directly changing the rent levels they face or indirectly via changes to the structure of programmes designed to subsidise housing for the poor.\ud \ud Here we estimate a static discrete choice labour supply model which allows for housing benefit programme participation. We use samples of 42491 married women and 13340 unmarried women drawn from Great Britain Family Resources Surveys 1994/5-97/8. We find that women are quite responsive to labour supply incentives, housing benefit income has similar incentive effects to earned income which suggests any "stigma" is small. Our analysis is complemented by simulating housing benefit and direct rent subsidy reforms.

In the simple framework of a static model for equilibrium wages and labour supplies, we show that the incidence of income tax on equilibrium wages can be measured independently from the individual labour supply elasticity. This extends recent work by Blundell, Duncan and Meghir (1998) and Eissa and Liebman (1996), who estimate labour supply elasticities,and Gruber (1997), who estimates tax incidence on earnings. Our measurements are based on a large multi-level longitudinal data set of Danish private sector establishments. We find strong evidence for partial shifting of the burden of income tax from worker to employer. Higher marginal tax rates are associated with increases in gross wages and earnings. A traditional estimate of the elasticity of labour supply with respect to the net wage, which assumes no shifting of the burden of income tax, is found to overstate incentive effects by a factor of two.

Several commodities are provided at zero or subsidised prices directly to those who are intended to consume them in an attempt to circumvent agency problems associated with providing a cash transfer to household heads. In addition, some countries provide extensive in-kind transfers for the specific needs of particular client groups such as the elderly, the disbled, and dependent children. This paper is concerned with three UK programmes: a school nutrition programme that provides children from poor households with meals at school at zero cost that ineligble children have the option of buying; free milk to poor households with pre-school children; and a further free milk programme for pre-school children in daycare. We investigate the relationship between household food and milk expenditures, prices, income, demographic variables and programme participation. We find evidence that is consistent with in-kind public transfers being offset by the actions of altruistic parents which undermines the case for such transfers.