We find that the main featues of labor policy across OECD countries can be explained by a simple general equilibrium search model with risk neutral agents and a government that chooses policy to maximize a social welfare function. In equilibrum, policies are chosen to optimal redistribute income...

We study aggregation - or sample frequencies - of time series, e.g. aggregation from weekly to monthly or quarterly time series. Aggregation usually gives shorter time series but spurious phenomena, in e.g. daily observations, can on the other hand be avoided. An important issue is the effect of...

Health care provision is undergoing major reforms in Europe as a reaction to rapidly increasing expenditure and lowered political acceptance to commit public finance to cover the deficits. The Dutch government will decide in 2007 if the current budget system will be replaced by a more...

We examine the interaction between commodity taxes and parallel imports in a simple two-country model with imperfect competition. While governments determine non-cooperatively their commodity tax rate, the volume of parallel imports is determined endogenously by the retailing sector. We compare...

According to the Competition Act, a merger that impedes eective competition signi cantly, in particular by creating or strengthening a dominant postition, shall be prohibited. To decide whether this is the case the authorities need a quanti able model of the relationship between the variables...

It has been argued that the effect of competition on a company’s incentive to innovate and to reduce managerial slack depends on the initial level of efficiency. For example, while firms close to the technology frontier invest more in innovation if competition increases, backward firms reduce...

We exploit the regional variation in negative attitudes towards immigrants to Sweden in order to analyse what are the consequences of such attitudes have on immigrants welfare. A well educated immigrant from a non developed country who lives in a municipality with strong negative attitudes earns...

The eects of discrimination of immigrants on the labour market are studied within a search and wage-bargaining setting including a risk of losing skills during the experience of unemployment. The negative eects of discrimination in the form of higher unemployment and lower wages spread to all...

Estimating the value of top managerial talent is a central topic of research that has attracted widespread attention from academics and practitioners. Yet, testing for the importance of chief executive officers (CEOs) on firm outcomes is challenging. In this paper we test for the impact of CEOs...

Boards are endogenously chosen institutions determined by observable and unobservable firm characteristics. Empirical studies of large publicly traded firms have successfully controlled for observable determinants of board size and shown a robust negative relationship between board size and firm...