To Örebro University

Objectives: Despite the limited and relatively weak empirical evidence for the effectiveness of part-time sick leave, the Swedish government has promoted the use of part-time sick leave instead of full-time sick leave, when possible. A few studies reported the effectspart-time sick leave on the probability to return to work. Our paper aims to bring more empirical evidence for the importance of part-time sick leave on the return to work by estimating the effects of part-time sick leave on the probability to return to work for each of the five years after the sickness spell started. 

Data and Methods: The sample analyzed in this paper is extracted from the National Agency of Social Insurance in Sweden and includes all employees aged 21-56 years in 2006 when they starteda sickness spell of at least two weeks on full-time, and were employed but not on sick leave during 2001-2005. Data include longitudinal information related to both employment and social insurance related events during 2001-2013. The point of departure is an employed individual with a diagnosed health condition and an accompanying reduced work capacity. This implies a choice between part-time or full-time sick leave. The choice of the degree of sick leave is a joint decision made by the employee, the employer, the physician, and the social insurance administrator. The common objective of the four parties is to choose the alternative with the highest likelihood of recovery of the lost work capacity. A suitable structure for this framework is a discrete choice switching regression model with an endogenous switch between the two states: part-time and full-time sick leave. We estimate the effects of part-time sick leave on the probability to return to work for each of the five years after the sickness spell started.

Results: The estimates of our two parameters of primary interest, the average treatment effect (ATE) and the expected effect of the treatment on the treated (TT) vary across the years. The ATE-estimates for 2007 and 2008 is negative, but positive for each of the next three years, which shows that employees who switched from full-time to part-time sick leave have on average a lower probability to return to work the first and the second year after the sick leave spell started than employees who were onfull-time sick leave the whole sickness spell. The TT-estimates are negative for all five years, which means that there was a small average lost from part-time sick leave for those who actually were on part-time sick leave.

This study examines how the Swedish earned income tax credit (EITC) introduced in 2007 affected the labor supply of men and women living in two-adult households and the extent to which children in the household affected the outcome. Because the EITC is non-targeted in Sweden, it is difficult to form a meaningful comparison group for a regular ex-post quasi-experimental evaluation of the reform. Therefore, a structural discrete choice labor supply model for two-adult households is formulated and used in an ex ante analysis. In a first step, estimates from the structural labor supply model are used to determine the wage elasticities of the labor supply of men and women separately, both with and without children in the household. Our results correspond to those previously reported in the academic literature: somewhat larger wage elasticities are found for women than for men, while similar labor supply responses are found for men and women when there are no children in the household. In a second step, the labor supply model is used to simulate the labor supply responses to the EITC. Our results indicate that the largest response is on the extensive margin, with an increase in the labor force participation of both men and women. While the labor supply effect on the intensive margin is smaller, it is positive for both men and women working part-time. However, the presence of children affects work hours differently for men and women working part-time or not at all. For men, the percentage change in the work hours was much higher for those living in a household without children, whereas for women, the changes are almost the same for the two types of households.

Inkomsttaket i den allmänna arbetslöshetsförsäkringen är idag så lågt att få individer erhåller 80 procent av tidigare lön. Det har drivit fram alternativa lösningar för inkomstbortfall vid arbetslöshet där fackförbunden idag erbjuder sina medlemmar kompletterande kollektiva inkomstförsäkringar med högre inkomsttak. I den här artikeln undersöks dels om dessa försäkringar är associerade med längre arbetslöshetsperioder, dels om sannolikheten för återfall i nya ersättningsperioder påverkas.

This paper examines how the non-targeted earned income tax credit (EITC) introduced in Sweden in 2007 affected the labor supply of men and women living in a two-adult household and to what extent children in the household affects the outcome. Using a structural discrete labor supply model for two-adult households, we estimate the impact of the EITC on labor supply and disposable income separately for households with and without children. In a first step, the empirical model is evaluated by estimating wage elasticites for men and women separately. Our results correspond in level to those estimated elsewhere in the literature, with somewhat larger estimates for women than for men. Our results also suggest that the labor supply responses for men and women are more similar when no children are in the household. In a second step, the model is used to evaluate the labor supply effects of the EITC. Our results indicate that the largest response is on the extensive margin, with an increase in the labor force for both men and women. The labor supply effect on the intensive margin is smaller, yet positive for men and women working part-time in general, but the presence of children in the household brings difference between men and women. For households without children, the response is about the same in size for men as for women. For households with children, the response for men was about the same as for the case without children, but the response for women was about half in size. This indicates that women are less responsive to economic incentives than men when children are present in the household.

In Romania, the communist regime promoted an official policy of gender equality for more than 40 years, providing equal access to education and employment, and restricting pay differentiation based on gender. After its fall in December 1989, the promotion of equal opportunities and treatment for women and men did not constitute a priority for any of the governments of the 1990s. This paper analyzes both gender and occupational wage gaps before and during the first years of transition to a market economy, and finds that the communist institutions did succeed in eliminating the gender wage differences in female- and male-dominated occupations, but not in gender-integrated occupations. During both regimes, wage differences were in general much higher among workers of the same gender working in different occupations than between women and men working in the same occupational group, and women experienced a larger variation of occupational wage differentials than men.

Using a dynamic discrete choice model that controls for unobserved heterogeneity and the initial conditions problem, we estimate the state dependence in Swedish social assistance for Swedish-born and foreign-born who were single in 1990 before the recession period started. The estimates of the structural state dependence for Swedish-born singles indicate that it is unaffected by the event of living together with a partner, and the effect is significantly lower for women than for men. For the foreign-born singles, the state dependence for those who stay single the whole decade is equally strong for men and women, and almost not affected when the foreign-born single started to live together with a foreign-born partner.

Although the economic integration of immigrants has been the subject of a large number of studies, the research on the effect of intermarriage on immigrants' economic integration/assimilation is scarce and has no equivalence in the literature on the receipt of social assistance. This study fills this gap in the literature by estimating the structural state dependence in social assistance in Sweden during 1990-1999 by different types of households, which were grouped by the country of birth of the sampled individual and his/her partner. Using a dynamic discrete choice model that controls for unobserved heterogeneity and the initial conditions problem, we find that state dependence in Swedish social assistance was relatively strong during 1990-1999 for some household types. Although Swedish-born partners who separated are one of the groups with the lowest receipt of social assistance (i.e., 1.08-1.76%), these individuals exhibit the highest state dependence (24.4 percentage points). Foreign-born singles have almost the same value for the state dependence, but these individuals also have the highest receipt of social assistance (18.47%). Surprisingly, the group with the lowest receipt of social assistance (0.27-3.06%) and the lowest state dependence (4.7 percentage points) are the foreign-born women living together with a Swedish-born man.

This study examines how the non-targeted earned income tax credit (EITC) introduced in Sweden in 2007 has affected the labor supply of men and women living together in two-adault households and the extent to which children affect related outcomes. Using a structural discrete labor supply model for two adult households, we estimate the impact of the EITC on both labor supply and disposable income separately for households with and without children. Our results suggest that wage elasticities differ for men and women with or without children, a result that is in line with earlier literature. However, women increased their labor supply bu 0.9 percent regardless of children in the household, whereas men with children increased their labor supply by approximately 0.5 percent and those without children increased their labor supply by 0.7 percent.

Long-term social assistance dependency is a growing concern in Sweden and other European countries. In order for policy makers to design effective welfare reforms it is important to know how strong the state dependence associated with social assistance is in the population and to what extent it varies with different factors, and among different groups. We estimate the effect of the state dependence in social assistance for Sweden during the 1990s, for both Swedish-born and foreign-born. Using a dynamic discrete choice model that controls for unobserved heterogeneity and the initial conditions problem, we found that the effect is three times larger for foreign-born compared to Swedish-born. However, when the effect is distributed over time, it decreases and loses significance after three years for both groups. This suggests that more resources should be allocated for programs that connect working-age recipients with the labor market as early as possible.

Long-term social assistance dependency is a growing concern in Sweden and other European countries. In order for policy makers to design effective welfare reforms it is important to know how strong the state dependence associated with social assistance is in the population and to what extent it varies with different factors, and among different groups. We estimate the effect of the state dependence in social assistance for Sweden during the 1990s, for both Swedish-born and foreign-born. Using a dynamic discrete choice model that controls for unobserved heterogeneity and the initial conditions problem, we found that the effect is three times larger for foreign-born compared to Swedish-born. However, when the effect is distributed over time, it decreases and loses significance after three years for both groups. This suggests that resources should be allocated for programs that connect working-age recipients with the labor market as early as possible.