1,721,200 research outputs found
Five minutes with Mats Persson: “National parliaments are the solution to the EU’s democratic deficit”
No full textEuropean Parliament elections are due to be held in May 2014. Ahead of the elections, EUROPP’s Managing Editor Stuart Brown spoke to Mats Persson, the Director of Open Europe, about his views on the European Parliament, the role of national parliaments in the integration process, and whether the efforts to reform the European Union advocated by British Prime Minister David Cameron are likely to be successful
Job Security and Work Absence: Evidence from a Natural Experiment
Get PDFWe analyze the consequences for sickness absence of a selective softening of job security legislation for small firms in Sweden in 2001. According to our differences-in-difference estimates, aggregate absence in these firms fell by 0.2-0.3 days per year. This aggregate net figure hides important effects on different groups of employees. Workers remaining in the reform firms after the reform reduced their absence by about one day. People with a high absence record tended to leave reform firms, but these firms also became less reluctant to hire people with a record of high absence.seniority rules, sick pay insurance, firing costs, moral hazard
Si and CdTe detector models from JMI 043501 (2020)
No full textSi and CdTe detector models from Mats Persson, Adam Wang, and Norbert J.
Pelc "Detective quantum efficiency of photon-counting CdTe and Si
detectors for computed tomography: a simulation study," Journal of
Medical Imaging 7(4), 043501 (17 July 2020). Change log:2021-09-14: added a script generateFullPsf.m for generating the full psf from the intermediate.</div
The European Social Model: Lessons for Developing Countries
Get PDFDeveloping countries, in particular the least developed ones, probably have more to learn from social policies in Europe during the early 20th century than from the elaborate welfare-state arrangements after World War II. In addition to macroeconomic growth and stability, the main ambitions must be to fight human deprivation, including illiteracy, malnutrition, poor access to water and sanitation – and, in some cases, also weak, incompetent and/or corrupt governments. It is also important that informal systems in the fields of transfers and social services are not destroyed when developing countries embark on more formal systems in these fields in the future. The European experience also warns against the creation of social systems that are so generous that disincentives, moral hazard and receding social norms seriously distort the national economy, including the labor market.Welfare state; social policy; developing economies
Taxation and Tournaments
Get PDFThis paper analyzes the effects of progressive taxes on labour supply and income distribution in the context of the rank-order tournament model originally developed by Lazear and Rosen (1981). We show conditions under which a more progressive tax schedule will cause so large general equilibrium effects that the inequality in disposable income will actually increase. We also show that a non-zero redistributive tax is always optimal if society’s welfare function displays inequality aversion; this result always holds, regardless of behavioral responses and general equilibrium effects.TBA
Disability Insurance, Population Health and Employment in Sweden
Get PDFThis paper describes the development of population health and disability insurance utilization for older workers in Sweden and analyses the relation between the two. We use three different measures of population health: (1) the mortality rate (measured between 1950 and 2009); (2) the prevalence of different types of health deficiencies obtained from Statistics Sweden’s Survey on Living Conditions (ULF, 1975-2005); (3) the utilization of health care from the inpatient register (1968–2008). We also study the development of the relative health between disability insurance recipients and non-recipients. Finally, we study the effect of the introduction of less strict eligibility criteria for older workers in 1970 and 1972 as well as the subsequent abolishment of these rules in 1991 and 1997, respectively.Disability insurance; Population health
Time Consistency of Fiscal and Monetary Policy: A Solution
Get PDFThis paper demonstrates how time consistency of the Ramsey policy–the optimal fiscal and monetary policy under commitment–can be achieved. Each government should leave its successor with a unique maturity structure for the nominal and indexed debt, such that the marginal benefit of a surprise inflation exactly balances the marginal cost. Unlike in earlier papers on the topic, the result holds for quite a general Ramsey policy, including time varying polices with positive inflation and positive nominal interest rates. We compare our results with those in Persson, Persson, and Svensson (1987), Calvo and Obstfeld (1990), and Alvarez, Kehoe, and Neumeyer (2004).time consistency; Ramsey policy; surprise inflation
Gender and Overconfidence
Get PDFDo males differ from females in terms of self-confidence? The structure of the Economics I exam at Stockholm University provides an opportunity to shed some light on this question. By answering an extra, optional question, the students can aim for a higher mark. We find a clear gender difference in that male students are more inclined than female students to take this opportunity. This difference in selfassessment is more pronounced among younger than among older students.Overconfidence; gender differences; exam behavior; exam results
A Continuous Theory of Income Insurance
Get PDFIn this paper we treat an individual’s health as a continuous variable, in contrast to the traditional literature on income insurance, where it is regularly treated as a binary variable. This is not a minor technical matter; in fact, a continuous treatment of an individual’s health sheds new light on the role and functioning of income insurance and makes it possible to capture a number of real-world phenomena that are not easily captured in binary models. In particular, moral hazard is not regarded as outright fraud, but as a gradual adjustment of the willingness to go to work when income insurance is available. Further, the model can easily encompass phenomena such as administrative rejection of claims and the role of social norms. It also gives a rich view of the desirability of insurance in the first place.moral hazard, disability insurance, sick pay, work absence, social norms
- …
