Göra illa för att hjälpa eller hjälpa till att göra illa? : Arbetslösas reservationslöner, jobbchanser och återanställningsinkomster

Hurting to help or helping to hurt? The reservation wages of unemployed, job chances and reemployment incomes in Sweden Economic incentives and their impact on the job search behaviour of the unemployed have been a central focus in the academic and political debate in Sweden. A key concept has been the reservation wages of the unemployed, the lowest income at which an unemployed person would be willing to accept a job offer. Unemployment benefit systems have been argued to raise and maintain reservation wages at high levels that lower job chances. This has been supported by a large number of international studies. From this perspective lower reservation wages would function as protection against long term unemployment and the scarring effects associated with it. High reservation wages might however, based on the same behavioural assumptions, have a human capital preserving effect. The possibility to hold out for the right job should reduce human capital losses compared to accepting the first available job offer. In this article we use Swedish longitudinal micro data combining interview and register data in order to investigate three central aspects reservation wages in a Swedish context: factors influencing the setting of reservation wages, the effect of reservation wage on job chances and the impact of reservation wages on reemployment incomes. Our findings show that benefit level and pre-unemployment position in the wage structure are central factors for setting the reservation wage. The effects of reservation wages were however not the expected. No effects were found on job chances, while a strong positive effect was found on reemployment income. This together indicates that high reservation wages have a human capital preserving effect in Sweden.

The effects of attitudes and personality traits on mode choice

We hypothesise that differences in people's attitudes and personality traits lead them to attribute varying importance to environmental considerations, safety, comfort, convenience and flexibility. Differences in personality traits call be revealed not only in the individuals' choice of transport, but also in other actions of their everyday lives-such as how much they recycle, whether they take precautions or avoid dangerous pursuits. Conditioning on a set of exogenous individual characteristics, we use indicators of attitudes and personality traits to form latent variables for inclusion in an, otherwise standard, discrete mode choice model. With a sample of Swedish commuters, we find that both attitudes towards flexibility and comfort, as well as being pro-environmentally inclined, influence the individual's choice of mode. Although modal time and cost still are important, it follows that there are other ways, apart from economic incentives, to attract individuals to the, from society's perspective, desirable public modes of transport. Our results should provide useful information to policy-makers and transportation planners developing sustainable transportation systems.