Tomas Korpi

Is utility related to employment status? Employment, unemployment, labor market policies and subjective well-being among Swedish youth

Abstract Inherent in wage bargaining models and in models of job search is the assumption that utility is related to employment status. It is thus postulated that unemployment is associated with lower utility than employment, or that unemployment is moderated by manpower programs and unemployment benefits. Yet despite the centrality of such assumptions, empirical evidence on these issues is rarely presented. This paper presents such evidence, analyzing differences in subjective well-being among youth relating to employment, unemployment, participation in manpower programs and receipt of unemployment benefits. The results show that, relative to employment, unemployment has an unambiguously negative effect on well-being. Manpower programs seem to occupy an intermediate position. They are clearly better than unemployment and there are suggestions that they are worse than employment.

Good Friends in Bad Times? Social Networks and Job Search among the Unemployed in Sweden

How information about job openings is distributed is held to be a central determinant of social stratification. Interest here has focused on social networks, yet methodological problems in earlier research prevent definite conclusions from being drawn. Equally serious are the limitations associated with the setting of earlier research, since previous studies have examined the impact of networks in situations in which contact networks would be expected to matter. This article instead explores the limits of social networks by highlighting a situation in which networks are less likely to be of great importance: job search among the unemployed in Sweden. Contact networks have been assumed to be less useful for unemployed job searchers, and Sweden has a substantively important alternative information channel in the public employment agencies. Evidence is offered here on how the employment probability is affected by the use of contacts during the period of job search, with the problem of selection bias taken into explicit consideration. The results indicate network size to be positively related to the probability of employment, but question the importance of tie strength.

Training and industrial restructuring: Structural change and labour mobility in West Germany and Sweden

While the structural changes that have taken place in the labour markets of the industrialised world over the past decades are well documented, less is known about how individuals respond to this changing environment. This includes the extent of intersectoral mobility during the work career, skill differentials in mobility, the impact of the type of training on mobility and changes in mobility patterns over a long period of time. Against this backdrop, the purpose of this paper is to examine intersectoral labour mobility during the first 15 years of working careers in Sweden and West Germany. The analyses show that individuals in both countries tend to move away from industry into other sectors during their careers, but that this tendency is rather weak. While there are some mobility differences among educational categories, the differences between transition probabilities of German apprentices and Swedish vocational school students are insignificant. In the face of the massive transformation of employment structures, the importance of variation in the curricula is probably minuscule.

Changing work-life inequality in Sweden : Globalization and other causes

In the three decades following World War II, macroeconomic conditions were generally favourable throughout the Western world. Economic growth was high, and unemployment and inflation low. At the same time, economic inequality was decreasing. This long period of positive change came to a halt in the early 1970s with the first oil crisis in 1973 and the advent of stagflation. After 10–15 years of poor macroeconomic performance, including a second oil crisis in 1979, a new trend pattern emerged in the 1980s. Inmany Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, economic growth picked up and inflation went down. Rates of unemployment and wage inequality, however, continued to be problematic.

Att möta globaliseringen

De nordiska landernas ekonomiska utbyte med omvarlden har okat dramatiskt. I debatten har globaliseringens foresprakare sett internationellt utbyte som en forutsattning for fortsatt valstand, medan ...

Globalization and Uncertainty: Earnings Volatility in Sweden, 1985–2003

Earnings volatility has been linked it to economic integration only through contradictory conjectures. We assess globalization’s role by examining volatility trends in manufacturing, private services, and public services. If trade increases uncertainty, volatility trends should differ markedly across industries since manufacturing, in contrast to especially public services, is exposed to international competition. We analyze earnings trajectories in Sweden 1985-2003, a country and period evincing accelerating trade, finding no indications of greater volatility increases in manufacturing.

The governance of poverty: Welfare reform, activation policies, and social assistance benefits and caseloads in Nordic countries

Social assistance benefits are the last resort in national social protection systems, and decentralizing reforms leading to increasing local discretion over implementation of national legislation was an international trend frequently referred to as devolution. More recent reforms have instead often implied recentralization and/or involved mandatory institutional cooperation between welfare agencies located at different hierarchical levels. In contrast to North America, there is little European evidence on the extent to which shifting responsibilities influence benefit levels and benefit receipt. Using individual level register data from Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden and applying a difference-in-difference approach, we link changes in legislation to changes in municipal benefits as well as caseloads during the period 1990–2010. We only find indications of reform effects linked to distinct benefit centralization, concluding that other reforms were too insubstantial to have an impact. Combined with earlier evidence, this suggests that in order to have an impact, welfare reform requires marked changes in authority.

Immigration and Integration Policy and Labour Market Attainment Among Immigrants to Scandinavia

Insufficient integration of immigrants into the labour market has been identified as a major problem in the Scandinavian countries Denmark, Norway and Sweden. Integration depends, inter alia, on immigration and integration policy, and for most of the post-war period the policies of the three countries displayed strong similarities. However, in the early 2000s Denmark increasingly deviated from its two neighbours, introducing more restrictive immigration and stricter integration policies. Comparing both pre- and post-reform immigrants across Scandinavia, we assess the wider impact of this comprehensive policy reversal by tracking the evolution of employment and earnings gaps between 1993 and 2006. We use large data sets with individual-level register information allowing us to account for immigrant labour force composition and to examine sub-groups of immigrants. The results do not indicate that the Danish reforms had any clear-cut effect on either employment or earnings among non-Western immigrants. Moreover, integration in Norway and Sweden was not unequivocally worse despite the absence of similar reforms, raising questions regarding the aptness of the Danish reversal.

Att möta globaliseringen : Utbildning, aktivering och social exkludering i Norden

De nordiska landernas ekonomiska utbyte med omvarlden har okat dramatiskt. I debatten har globaliseringens foresprakare sett internationellt utbyte som en forutsattning for fortsatt valstand, medan ...