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Hovedformålet med denne studien har vært å kartlegge og systematisere det som finnes av forskning i Nord-Europa om effekter av innsats for å hjelpe ungdom å få et fotfeste i arbeidsmarkedet – ungdom som av ulike grunner befinner seg i utkanten av arbeidsmarkedet, eller som står i risikosonen for å havne utenfor for eksempel grunnet manglende utdanning. Målgruppen vår er ungdom opp til 30-årsalderen. I tillegg til de fem nordiske landene inkluderer vi Tyskland, Storbritannia og Nederland. Alle disse landene har iverksatt ulike typer aktiviseringstiltak innrettet mot å hindre at ungdom faller ut av de sentrale samfunnsarenaene knyttet til arbeidsliv og utdanningsinstitusjoner. Institusjonelle forhold og offentlig politikk som ligger til grunn for arbeidsmarkedsregulering og utdannings-/yrkesopplæringssystemer, men også velferdsordninger og aktiveringsstrategier, spiller en viktig rolle for å tilrettelegge – men også hindre – ungdoms inntreden på arbeidsmarkedet og de første yrkesaktive årene. Vi avdekker likheter og forskjeller mellom de ulike landene. Dette vil danne et bakteppe for meta-analysen som sammenstiller evalueringsstudier fra utvalgte land slik at vi kan danne oss en bredere forståelse av hvorvidt ulike tiltak som er rettet mot ungdom, har virket etter hensikten på tvers av land og studier. I alt inngår om lag 425 effektestimater fra 44 forskjellige forskningsarbeider i meta-analysen. Våre konklusjoner bekrefter at opplæringstiltak og lønnstilskudd gir opphav til mer positive effektestimater enn arbeidspraksis og sysselsettingstiltak i offentlig sektor. Det er også verdt å merke seg at effektestimatene tenderer til å bli mer positive over tid, hvilket kan tyde på at det finner sted en læreprosess der tiltakene blir gradvis mer effektive. A comparative analysis of the effect of policies to improve the labour market prospects of at-risk youth in North European countries

Based on administrative data, we analyze empirically the effects of stricter conditionality for social assistance receipt on welfare dependency and high school completion rates among Norwegian youths. Our evaluation strategy exploits a geographically differentiated implementation of conditionality. The causal effects are identified on the basis of larger-than-expected within-municipality changes in outcomes that not only coincide with the local timing of conditionality implementation, but do so in a way that correlates with individual ex ante predicted probabilities of becoming a social assistance claimant. We find that stricter conditionality significantly reduces welfare claims and increases high school completion rates.

In many countries, general practitioners (GPs) are assigned the task of controlling the validity of their own patients' insurance claims. At the same time, they operate in a market where patients are customers free to choose their GP. Are these roles compatible? Can we trust that the gatekeeping decisions are untainted by private economic interests? Based on administrative registers from Norway with records on sick pay certification and GP-patient relationships, we present evidence to the contrary: GPs are more lenient gatekeepers the more competitive is the physician market, and a reputation for lenient gatekeeping increases the demand for their services.

While integration policies typically focus on labor market entry, we present evidence showing that immigrants from low‐income countries tend to have more precarious jobs, and face more severe consequences of job loss, than natives. For immigrant workers in the Norwegian private sector, the probability of job loss in the near future is twice that of native workers. Using corporate bankruptcy for identification, we find that the adverse effects of job loss on future employment and earnings are more than twice as large for immigrant employees.

Is it possible to sustain an ambitious and redistributive Nordic welfare state in a Europe with open borders? Drawing on longitudinal administrative records spanning four decades, we first present discouraging historical evidence showing that labor migrants from low-income source countries tend to have unstable employment careers with marked overrepresentation in welfare programs. This pattern extends to post-accession labor migrants from Eastern Europe, who quickly experience high rates of unemployment. The article discusses possible avenues for making the welfare state “migration robust.” We argue that there are alternatives to reclosing borders and/or cutting down welfare state ambitions, and recommend policies based on strengthening of activity requirements in social insurance programs, raising minimum job standards, and substitution of work-oriented services for cash-based family allowances.

We evaluate the impacts of a compulsory dialogue meeting for long-term sick-listed workers in Norway. The meeting is organised by the local social security administration after around six months of absence, and its purpose is to bring together the absentee, the employer, and the family physician to discuss whether arrangements can be made to facilitate partial or full work resumption. Our causal analysis is based on random-assignment-like geographical variation in the meeting propensity. We find that the meetings reduce absence duration considerably, both through a notification and an attendance effect. They also reduce the risk of premature labour market exit.

We exploit a comprehensive restructuring of the early retirement system in Norway in 2011 to examine labor supply responses to alternative pension reform strategies relying on improved work incentives (flexibility) or increased access ages (prescription), respectively. We find that increasing the returns to work is a powerful policy tool: The removal of the earnings test at age 63 led to an immediate increase in average annual labor earnings among the affected mature workers by around $14,700 (NOK 90,000). The implied uncompensated labor earnings elasticity (the percentage change in average gross earnings relative to the percentage change in average work-incentives) is around 0.25.

We exploit a comprehensive restructuring of the early retirement system in Norway in 2011 to examine labor supply responses to alternative pension reform strategies relying on improved work incentives (flexibility) or increased access ages (prescription), respectively. We find that increasing the returns to work is a powerful policy tool: The removal of the earnings test at age 63 led to an immediate increase in average annual labor earnings among the affected mature workers by around $14,700 (NOK 90,000). The implied uncompensated labor earnings elasticity (the percentage change in average gross earnings relative to the percentage change in average work-incentives) is around 0.25.

Should unemployment insurance (UI) systems provide coverage for underemployed job seekers? Based on a statistical analysis of Norwegian unemployment spells, we conclude that the answer to this question is yes. Allowing insured job seekers to retain partial UI benefits during periods of insufficient part-time work not only reduces UI expenditures during the part-time work period; it also unambiguously reduces the time until a regular self-supporting job is found. Probable explanations are that even small temporary part-time jobs provide access to useful vacancy-information and that such jobs are used by employers as a screening device when hiring from the unemployment pool.

The Nordic welfare model has received a lot of positive attention around the world. High standard of living, small income disparities and substantial social mobility looks like a very attractive package. Moreover, sound public finances and strong emphasis on environmental sustainability suggest that today’s success has not been accomplished at the expense of future generations. But is there really a unique “Nordic Supermodel”, unshaken by the global economic crisis and capable of producing continuous high growth and world class welfare services when many developed economies struggle with the impacts of global competition and population ageing? This book shows that Nordic performance has not been quite as unique or uniform as often claimed. The recent global and European crisis and country specific shocks have affected also the Nordic countries, some of them very strongly. And there are as many variants of the Nordic model as there are Nordic countries. Going forward, also the Nordic countries will be challenged by ageing, globalisation and technological change, some more than the others. On the other hand many fundamentals remain strong in the Nordic countries, and, what is perhaps most important, the Nordics have proved themselves capable of adjusting. Labour market practices, pension policies, and production of public services have been reformed to match new circumstances. Public policies have been aimed at creating new jobs and helping people in transition, not at protecting uncompetitive businesses. There is a strong, rational tradition of consensual policy making. Further reforms are needed, and some widening of income disparities may be inevitable. The message of the book is, however, that refocused and recalibrated in a realistic scale the Nordic model has good chances of thriving well into the future.

We investigate the impacts of economic incentives on the duration and outcome of temporary disability insurance (TDI) spells. The analysis is based on a large quasi-experiment in Norway, with a complete overhaul of the TDI benefit system. Our findings show that the labor supply of TDI claimants responds to both the benefit-level and to the level of local labor demand. The estimated elasticity of the employment hazard with respect to the benefit-level is – 0.3. We also find that the level of TDI benefits significantly affects the transition rate to alternative social insurance programs such as permanent disability and unemployment.

Based on administrative data from Norway, we examine the extent to which family doctors influence their clients' propensity to claim sick pay and disability benefits. The analysis is based on exogenous shifts of family doctors occurring when physicians quit, retire, or for other reasons sell their patient lists to other doctors. Our key finding is that family doctors have significant influence on their clients' benefit claims. We conclude that it is possible for family doctors to contain social insurance costs to some extent, and that there is a significant variation across doctors in the way they do so.

Based on administrative registers from Norway, we examine how unemployment insurance (UI) and active labor market programs (ALMP) affect the transition rates from unemployment to regular employment and entrepreneurship. We find that the entrepreneurship hazard is highly responsive with respect to UI incentives, and that the probability of starting up a new business increases sharply around the time of UI exhaustion. We also find that while participation in ALMP has a positive impact on the employment hazard, it has no effect on entrepreneurship. We speculate that this reflects the programs' one-sided focus on job search rather than job creation.

The paper argues that a comprehensive activation strategy is called for – in both unemployment and disability insurance – to minimize the conflict between income insurance and work incentives and to prevent the economic crisis from causing a long-lasting decline in labor force participation. A review of recent empirical evidence, particularly from the Scandinavian countries indicates that "mild" activation requirements effectively counteract moral hazard problems in social insurance. The paper also argues that the distinction between unemployment and disability is blurred, and that both temporary and permanent disability insurance programs should be designed to encourage and support the use of remaining (partial) work capacity.

Fiskeforvaltningen ønsker å bevare stedegne bestander, ut fra en antagelse om lokal tilpassning av fisk til det enkelte miljøet den lever i. Hovedmålsetningen for foreliggende undersøkelse har derfor vært å kartlegge genetisk variasjon og struktur hos ørret i Mjøsa. Det er innsamlet ørret fra de antatt viktigste reproduksjonslokalitetene, i alt 11 elver, samt fanget ørret i selve Mjøsa. Resultatene er basert på analyse av genetisk variasjon i 13 mikrosatellitt loci (korte DNA biter) for et utvalg av ungfisk og større stamfisk, tilsammen 514 ørret. Alle undersøkte populasjoner (bestander) viste stor grad av naturlig genetisk variasjon. Det ble ikke funnet vesentlige tegn på reduksjon av genetisk variasjon i nyere tid. Tidligere bestandsreduksjoner og utsettinger av ikke-stedegen ørret har hatt små varige genetiske effekter. Det var ingen indikasjoner på intern strukturering, dvs. flere bestander, innen elv. Vi fant derfor ingen forskjeller som kan antyde et genetisk skille (reproduktiv isolasjon) mellom for eksempel stedegen elveørret og mjøsvandrende storørret innen elver. Derimot var ørret fra de fleste undersøkte lokaliteter genetisk adskilte, dvs. hver elv har sin egen stamme av ørret. Den genetiske forskjellen var større med økende geografisk avstand mellom elvene. Gyteørreten vender derfor tilbake til sin egen oppvekstelv for å gyte, og hver elv har sin egen genetiske ørretbestand. Det er lite feilvandring, idet bare få første generasjons feilvandrere mellom elver ble funnet. Denne feilvandringen har i liten grad medført genetisk utveksling (genflyt) mellom bestander. Ørret fra samtlige elver bør derfor forvaltes som stedegne bestander. Ørreten fanget i selve Mjøsa kan best struktureres genetisk i 2 - 6 delbestander, dvs. at enkelte rekrutteringselver er spesielt viktige for Mjøsørreten. Hovedinndelingen i 2 delbestander var spesielt klar, og viser at ørret fra Gudbrandsdalslågen er spesielt genetisk adskilt fra de andre bestandene tilhørende Mjøsa. De genetiske analysene bekrefter derfor at dette vassdraget i stor grad bidrar til Mjøsas bestand av storørret.

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.

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.

We examine the impact of job loss on entrepreneurship behavior in Norway. Our identification strategy relies on the use of mass layoffs caused by bankruptcies as indicators of exogenous displacement. We find that working in a company which is going to close down due to bankruptcy during the next four years raises the subsequent entrepreneur rate by 3.7 percentage points (155 %) for men and 1.8 percentage points (180 %) for women, compared to working in a stable firm. These estimates are much larger than what has previously been reported in the literature. Taking into account that many workers lose their jobs in the comparison group of stable firms also, we reckon that the full effects of displacement are even larger.

Consider a setting where a treatment that starts at some point during a spell (e.g. in unemployment) may impact on the hazard rate of the spell duration, and where the impact may be heterogeneous across subjects. We provide Monte Carlo evidence on the feasibility of estimating the distribution of treatment effects from duration data with selectivity, by means of a nonparametric maximum likelihood estimator with unrestricted numbers of mass points for the heterogeneity distribution. We find that specifying the treatment effect as homogenous may yield misleading average results if the true effects are heterogeneous, even when the sorting into treatment is appropriately accounted for. Specifying the treatment effect as a random coefficient allows for precise estimation of informative average treatment effects including the program's overall impact on the mean duration.

We examine the origins and outcome of entrepreneurship on the basis of exceptionally comprehensive Norwegian matched worker-firm-owner data. In contrast to most existing studies, our notion of entrepreneurship not only comprises self-employment, but also employment in partly self-owned limited liability firms. Based on this extended entrepreneurship concept, we find that entrepreneurship tends to be profitable. It also raises income uncertainty, but the most successful quartile gains much more than the least successful quartile loses. Key determinants of the decision to become an entrepreneur are occupational qualifications, family resources, gender, and work environments. Individual unemployment encourages, while aggregate unemployment discourages entrepreneurship.

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.

We examine the remarkable rise in absenteeism among Norwegian employees since the early 1990's, with particular emphasis on disentangling the roles of cohort, age, and time. Based on a fixed effects model, we show that individual age-adjusted absence propensities have risen even more than aggregate absence rates from 1993 to 2005, debunking the popular hypothesis that the rise in absenteeism resulted from the inclusion of new cohorts - with weaker work-norms - into the workforce. We also reject the idea that the rise in absenteeism resulted from more successful integration of workers with poor health;on the contrary, a massive rise in disability rolls during the 1990's suggest that poor-health workers have left the labor market in unprecedented numbers.

Can activation requirements control moral hazard problems in public sickness absence insurance and accelerate recovery? Based on empirical analysis of Norwegian data, we show that it can. Activation requirements not only bring down benefit claims, they also reduce the likelihood that long-term sickness absence leads to inactivity. Our findings show that absentees who are issued graded (partial) absence certificates by their physician have shorter absences and higher subsequent employment rates than they would have had on regular sick leave. We conclude that the activation strategies that in recent years have permeated European and US welfare policy may fruitfully be carried over to sick leave insurance.

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.

Based on comprehensive administrative register data from Norway, we examine the determinants of sickness absence behavior; in terms of employee characteristics workplace characteristics, panel doctor characteristics, and economic conditions. The analysis is based on a novel concept of a worker's steady state sickness absence propensity, computed from a multivariate hazard rate model designed to predict the incidence and the duration of sickness absence for all workers. Key conclusions are i) that most of the cross-sectional variation in absenteeism is caused by genuine employee heterogeneity; ii) that the identity of a person's panel doctor has a significant impact on absence propensity; iii) that sickness absence insurance is frequently certified for reasons other than sickness; and iv) that the recovery rate rises enormously just prior to the exhaustion of sickness insurance benefits.

Elgen er en viktig naturressurs i Norge med stor økonomisk og rekreasjonsmessig betydning. Til tross for dette vet vi lite om elgens genetiske variasjon, og således evnen den norske elgen har til å takle forandringer i miljøet eller potensielt negative effekter av høsting. Basert på histo-riske kilder som antyder at den skandinaviske elgbestanden var svært lav for 150-200 år siden, er det imidlertid grunn til å anta at dagens elg er etterkommere av et begrenset antall individer og at den genetiske variasjonen følgelig er lav. For å undersøke hvorvidt dette kan være tilfelle, samt få en bedre oversikt over den genetiske bestandsstrukturen, har vi analysert den genetiske variasjonen i den norske elgbestanden. Analysene er basert på vevsprøver fra 585 elg innsamlet fra 159 kommuner fordelt over hele elgens utbredelsesområde i Norge. Alle individene ble analysert for genetisk variasjon i 15 mik-rosatellitter, hvorav 130 individer også ble analysert for variasjon i mitokondrielt DNA (mtDNA). I tillegg undersøkte vi hvordan den genetiske struktureringen samvarierte med elgens vekt og reproduksjon i de forskjellige delene av utbredelsesområdet. Alle de 15 mikrosatellittene viste betydelig grad av variasjon. Antall alleler registrert per mikro-satellitt varierte fra 4 til 13 med en middelverdi på 7,5. Gendiversiteten varierte fra 0,30 til 0,79 mellom mikrosatellitter, med et gjennomsnitt på 0,66. Gjennomgående fant vi høyere genetisk variasjon - uttrykt som heterozygositet, allelrikdom og antall private alleler - hos elg fra Sør-Trøndelag til Finnmark, samt i Oppland og grensefylkene til Sverige. Fra Buskerud til Rogaland var den genetiske variasjonen lavere. Også på Vestlandet (Møre til Hordaland) var den gene-tiske variasjonen høyere, mest sannsynlig fordi denne bestanden er etablert av immigranter fra både Østlandet og Trøndelag. Variasjonen i mtDNA viste det samme geografiske mønsteret. Totalt registrerte vi 7 haplotyper, hvorav 4 kun ble registrert i ett eller to individer. Flest haplotyper registrerte vi i Finnmark og Troms (4) og i grensefylkene på Østlandet (4). I Øst- og Sørlandsfylkene fra Oppland til Roga-land registrerte vi kun 2 haplotyper. To av de mest sjeldne haplotypene er tidligere registrert hos elg i Finland, mens en av de mest vanlige haplotypene tidligere er registrert i Sverige. Basert på allelvariasjonen i mikrosatellittene fant vi at den norske elgbestanden kan strukture-res i 2-5 genetiske delbestander. Denne inndelingen gav en sørlig og en nordlig hovedbestand, der grensen ligger mellom Trøndelag og Østlandet. Den nordlige bestanden kan ytterligere struktureres i en delbestand nord (nordnorsk bestand) og en sør for Salten i Nordland (midt-norsk bestand). I sør kan bestanden struktureres i en østlig delbestand, hovedsakelig i fylkene Hedmark, Akershus og Østfold (østnorsk-øst bestand), og en sørvestlig delbestand fra Tele-mark til Rogaland (sørnorsk bestand). Mellom disse bestandene, i Oppland, Buskerud og Vest-fold, er det antydet en tredje sørlig delbestand (østnorsk-vest bestand). Også elgen fra Horda-land og Sogn og Fjordane synes å tilhøre denne delbestanden, noe som samsvarer med at denne også er den nærmeste potensielle kildebestanden. Variasjonen i mtDNA viste det samme geografiske mønsteret. Totalt registrerte vi 7 haplotyper, hvorav 4 kun ble registrert i ett eller to individer. Flest haplotyper registrerte vi i Finnmark og Troms (4) og i grensefylkene på Østlandet (4). I Øst- og Sørlandsfylkene fra Oppland til Roga-land registrerte vi kun 2 haplotyper. Alces alces, DNA-mikrosatellitter, elg, fylker, genetikk, kommuner, mtDNA, Norge, overvåking, rekrutteringsrater, slaktevekt, carcass mass counties, DNA-microsatellites, genetics, monitoring, moose, mtDNA, municipalities, Norway, recruitment rates © Norsk institutt for naturforskning. Publikasjonen kan siteres fritt med kildeangivelse.