Search results for "Resource management"

Information Integration, Coordination Failures, and Quality of Prescribing

2022

Poor information flows hamper coordination, potentially leading to suboptimal decisions in health care. We examine the effects of a large-scale policy of health information integration. We use the staggered adoption of a nationwide electronic prescribing system over four years in Finland and prescription-level administrative data. Our results show no discernible effect on the probability of co-prescribing harmful drugs on average, but the heterogeneity analysis reveals that this probability reduces in rural regions, by 35 percent. This substantial reduction is driven by interacting prescriptions from different physicians and generalists. Information integration can therefore improve the coo…

Survival of the Weakest: Why the West Rules

2022

We study a model of institutions that evolve through conflict. We find that one of three configurations can emerge: an extractive hegemony, a balance of power between extrac-tive societies or a balance of power between inclusive societies -the latter being most conducive to innovation. As extractive societies are assumed to have an advantage in head to head confrontations we refer to this latter possibility as the survival of the weakest. Our contention is that the reason that the West "rules" can be traced back to two events both taking place in China: the invention of the cannon, which made possible the survival of the weakest in Europe; and the arrival of Genghis Khan, which led to the s…

2019

Abstract This paper examines the labor-market returns to a new form of postsecondary vocational education: vocational master's degrees. We use individual fixed effects models on a matched sample of students and non-students from Finland to capture any time-invariant differences across individuals. We find that attendance in vocational master's programs leads to an earnings increase of more than seven percent five years after entry. The estimated effect remains positive even if selection on unobservables is twice as strong as selection on observables. Earnings gains are similar by gender and age, but they are marginally higher for those in the health sector than for those in the business or …

The labour market consequences of self-employment spells:European evidence

2008

Hundreds of thousands of Europeans enter self-employment each year, but because self-employment spells are typically brief, many of them exit soon after entry. We examine how those who return to paid-employment fare on the labour market using the European Community Household Panel (ECHP). Like earlier evidence for the US, ours indicate that, in general, brief spells of self-employment do not increase average hourly earnings upon return to paid-employment. For highly educated men, an additional year of self-employment actually decreases their earnings by 4-5% relative to a year of continued wage employment. We also find that brief spells of self-employment are associated with increased proba…

The Return-to-Entrepreneurship Puzzle

2013

The returns to entrepreneurship are monetary and non-monetary. We offer new evidence on these returns using a large sample of genetically identical male twins. Our within-twin analysis suggests that OLS estimates are downwards, and traditional first-differenced panel data estimates upwards biased. We find no differences in the earnings of men with either low or high education. Our within-twin analysis of non-monetary returns shows that entrepreneurs with low education work longer hours and have greater responsibilities, but also face a reduced risk of divorce and less monotonous work tasks. The same does not apply to highly educated entrepreneurs.

Unemployment and Vacancy Dynamics with Imperfect Financial Markets

2018

This paper proposes a simple general equilibrium model with labour market frictions and an imperfect financial market. The aim of the paper is to analyse the transitional dynamics of unemployment and vacancies when financial constraints are in place. We model the financial sector as a monopolistically competitive banking sector that intermediates financial capital between firms. This structure implies a per period financial resource constraint which has a closed form solution and describes the transition path of unemployment and vacancies to their steady state values. We show that the transition path crucially depends on the degree of wage flexibility. When wages do not depend on the unempl…

Employment sector and pay gaps: Genetic and environmental influences

2012

This paper examines the role of genetic factors and shared environment in explaining the choice of working in the public sector and public-private sector pay gaps. The analyses are done using data for Finnish twins that span the period from 1990 to 2004. The data are based on two sources. The first data are Finnish Twin Cohort conducted by Department of Public Health in University of Helsinki. These data have been matched with the Finnish Longitudinal Employer-Employee Data (FLEED) kept by Statistics Finland. The standard behavioural genetics decomposition and DF (DeFries and Fulker 1985) analyses indicate that public sector employment is broadly influenced by the genetic factors by around …

Comprehensive school reform and labor market outcomes over the lifecycle: Evidence from Finland

2021

This study focused on the labor market effects of the Finnish comprehensive school reform in 1972–1977 over the lifecycle. The reform increased the age at which students are separated into vocational and general tracks from 11 to 16 as well as updated the curriculum to include more general content instead of vocational. Using longitudinal administrative register data and exploiting the gradual implementation of the reform, I found a negative effect on employment in early career and a positive effect later in the lifecycle. Results for labor earnings are more nuanced and sensitive to different model specifications, but a positive effect was found in the late career. After the reform, the tre…

Seniority rules, worker mobility and wages : evidence from multi-country linked employer-employee data

2018

We construct multi-country employer-employee data to examine the consequences of last-in, first-out rules. We identify the effects by comparing worker exit rates between different units of the same firms operating in Sweden and Finland, two countries that have different seniority rules. We observe a relatively lower exit rate for more senior workers in Sweden in the shrinking firms and among the low-wage workers. These empirical patterns are consistent with last-in, first-out rules in Sweden providing protection from dismissals for the more senior workers among the worker groups to whom the rules are most relevant. Similarly, we observe a steeper seniority-wage profile in Sweden, suggesting…

In-work benefits for married couples: an ex-ante evaluation of EITC and WTC policies in Italy

2014

This paper investigates labor supply and redistributive effects of in-work benefits for Italian married couples using a tax-benefit microsimulation model and a multi-sectoral discrete choice model of labor supply. We consider two in-work benefit schemes following the key principles of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and the Working Tax Credit (WTC) existing in the US and the UK, respectively. The standard design of these in-work benefits is however augmented with a new benefit premium for two-earner households in order to overcome the well-known disincentive effects that these welfare instruments may generate on secondary earners. In simulation, the proposed in-work benefits are finance…