Do time limits in the sickness insurance system increase return to work?

This article analyzes the effect of stricter enforcement of the eligibility criteria in the Swedish sickness insurance (SI) system. In 2008, time-restricted assessments of the individual’s working capacity on the 91st and 181st sick day was introduced. Taking advantage of the quasi-experimental feature of the intervention, I find a large and significant increased exit rate around the 181-day assessment. The impact is the result of longer spells outside SI-benefits, indicating that the stricter rules create disincentives to report sick.     

Network embeddedness in the internationalization of biotechnology entrepreneurs

This study investigates how entrepreneurs of biotech enterprises embed in domestic and international networks so as to internationalize. We advance a contextual framework of embeddedness of internationalizing entrepreneurs, providing a contribution (i) by synthesizing and applying existing conceptual insights from the networking literature to provide a more culturally sensitive view of getting embedded for international entrepreneurship in the biotech industry and (ii) by adding insights into the practices and (micro)processes of how and in what ways embeddedness integrates with the internationalization of biotech entrepreneurs. Our study involves six entrepreneurs from Canada, Finland, and New Zealand. Context-specific embeddedness was studied by exploring the (i) type, (ii) strength, (iii) locality, and (iv) importance of the international and national network ties among internationalizing entrepreneurs. We found differences in relation to the locality of universities and research institutes, role and type of financiers, and customer focus in internationalization. For instance, while customers were central to the embeddedness of Canadian and New Zealand entrepreneurs, Finnish entrepreneurs had no focus on their customers, but acted solely through sales channels and partners. The customer focus of New Zealand entrepreneurs was mainly international, whereas it was domestic in the case of Canadian entrepreneurs.     

Why did a majority of French voters reject the European Constitution?

This article assesses the reasons that led a majority of French voters to reject the 29 October 2004 Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe. Their reasons are less connected with the Treaty itself than with a fear of loss of national sovereignty, immigration, and relocation of firms to European countries where the workforce is cheaper.     

Fetal Iodine Deficiency and Schooling: A Replication of Field,Robles, and Torero (2009)*

Scholars have theorized that congenital health endowment is an important determinant of economic outcomes later in a person's life. Field, Robles, and Torero (2009, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 1, 140–169) find large increases in educational attainment caused by a reduction of fetal iodine deficiency following a set of iodine supplementation programs in Tanzania. We revisit the Tanzanian iodine programs with a narrow and wide replication of the study by Field et al. We are able to exactly replicate the original results. We find, however, that the findings are sensitive to alternative specification choices and sample restrictions. We try to address some of these concerns in the wide replication; we increase the sample size fourfold, and we improve the precision of the treatment variable by incorporating new institutional and medical insights. Despite the improvements, no effect is found. We conclude that the available data do not provide sufficient power to detect a possible effect, as treatment assignment cannot be measured with sufficient precision.     

Labor market institutions and industrial performance: an evolutionary study

This study investigates the impact of labor market institutions on industrial performance from a Schumpeterian perspective. We suggest that labor market institutions play a very important role in the process of creative destruction, because they may create an environment that encourages and enforces innovation, and help to reallocate resources, most importantly labor, through swift elimination of weak performers. We specifically look at the effects of the quantity of labor market regulations and inter-industry wage differentials on labor productivity for a panel of 44 countries for the period 1965–1999. Our findings suggest that those countries that introduce more regulations on conditions of employment and wages achieve higher levels of productivity. Moreover, wage compression raises productivity by reallocating resources to productive activities.