Research

Incentivizing Labour beyond Full-Time: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Belgium  (Job Market Paper) 

Demographic change has motivated various policy interventions to increase different margins of labour supply. This paper evaluates the recent ``flexi-job reform'' from Belgium, which introduced tax-exempt secondary jobs to specific sectors for near-to full-time workers. Using Belgian panel data for the years 2012-2019, I analyze the reform's impacts on labour supply, demand and wages for workers and firms using difference-in-differences estimation. The results show a small increase in both secondary working time and secondary wages among full-time workers and a six times larger increase in working time among the high-response subset of individuals with similar jobs prior to the reform. I also find strong effects on the firm side as firms in affected sectors restructure their workforce towards more secondary work. Taken together, this study shows that there exists a modest potential to increase labour supply on the full-time margin and suggests that hours constraints are the reason this potential was not used before. The Belgian policy represents an easily implementable approach to using this potential without obvious negative effects.  PDF, Appendix 

Deaton Review Sweden (with Arizo Karimi and Mårten Palme) 

As part of the IFS Deaton Review Country Studies, we study the development of inequalities in Sweden during the last 30 years.  We present our findings in two ways: one  part documents  trends in different inequality measures in a way that is comparable to the documented trends of the other 16 countries involved in this project. The second part describes the specific developments  that are relevant for the Swedish inequality trends. It gives a brief background to the recent increase in inequality of equivalized disposable incomes in Sweden reported by several OECD studies. We analyze separately the evolution of wage inequality, the importance of capital income, income redistribution through taxes and government transfers as well as the role of increased immigration to Sweden. After an initial increase in all inequality measures, we find a modest decrease in individual gross income inequality during the last 20 years due to unchanged working hours and slightly decreasing wage inequality. The simultaneously increasing disposable income inequality thus cannot be attributed to increased labour earnings inequality. Instead, our results suggest that it is mainly driven by more unequal capital income and less redistribution through the income security programs. Increased immigration to Sweden from low-income countries plays a smaller role.

Income Inequality and the Income Gradient in Mortality: Insights from Six Decades of Swedish Population Data 

(with Johannes Hagen, Lisa Laun and Mårten Palme) 

This study examines changes in per-period life expectancy in Sweden at age 40 from 1963 to 2019. The findings reveal that inequality in life expectancy has risen for both men and women. The income gradient, measured as the difference in life expectancy between the first and last percentiles of the income distribution, has increased from 4.3 to 9.6 years for men and from 4.9 to 7.4 years for women during the period from the 1960s to the 2010s. Contrary to the assumption of a positive link between income and health inequality, we demonstrate that health inequality has steadily increased throughout the study period, even during the era of decreasing income inequality between 1970 and 1990.