Suchergebnisse

This paper examines the effect of the polytechnic reform on geographical mobility. A polytechnic, higher education reform took place in Finland in the 1990s. It gradually transformed former vocational colleges into polytechnics and also brought higher education to regions that did not have a university before. This expansion of higher education provides exogenous variation in the regional supply of higher education. The reform raised the mobility of high school graduates across local labour markets in the years after they had completed their secondary studies, which indicated increased mobility between high school and post-secondary education. We estimate that the reform enhanced the annual migration rate of high school graduates by 1.2 percentage points over a 3-year follow-up period. This represents a substantial increase, because their baseline migration rate is 3.7 %. The effect fades several years after the completion of secondary studies.

An important problem in measuring the impacts of business subsidies is their separation from deadweight, which refers to changes that would have occurred even in the absence of intervention. Both public and private assessments have been used previously to study deadweigh, but so far little is known about how they correspond to each other. To address this issue we conducted a joint evaluation of the private and public assessments of deadweight for Finnish business projects. A unique dataset combines large register data with both public and private information on projects financed in 2000–03. First, our results suggest that the different measures for deadweight are greatly uncorrelated, and thus cannot be used as substitutes. Second, characteristics affecting the public and private measures of deadweight are identified using ordered probit models. We find that the public and private sectors emphasize different factors in their assessment of deadweight. Third, an upper bound for the level of deadweight spending is estimated at 73.8%.

Previous research has shown that the local environment is important for self-employment. The dynamics of self-employment varies between areas characterized by different labour market conditions, entrepreneurial traditions and other structural factors. This paper analyzes self-employment spells in Finland with a large register-based data set from the period 1987–2002. The main aim is to investigate the role of region-specific factors as compared with individual-specific and other factors on the duration of self-employment spells. First, the descriptive analysis shows that the exit rates from self-employment and the length of self-employment spells depend upon location (urban vs. rural area) and the cyclical trends in the economy. Second, self-employment duration is modelled using discrete time survival analysis. It is found that rural areas have significantly lower exit rates in the first years of self-employment than urban areas.

This paper examines the impact of the introduction of the value-added tax on inequality and government revenues using newly released macro data. We present both conventional country fixed effect regressions and instrumental variable analyses, where VAT adoption is instrumented using the previous values of neighbouring countries' VAT systems as an instrument. The results reveal – in contrast to earlier work – that the revenue consequences of the VAT have not been positive. The results indicate that income-based inequality has increased due to the VAT adoption, whereas consumption inequality has remained unaffected. ; peerReviewed

peer-reviewed ; Promoting Research and Development (R&D) and innovative activity is a key element of the EU Lisbon Agenda and is seen as playing a central part in stimulating economic development. In this paper we argue that, even allowing for benevolent policy-makers, informational asymmetries can lead to a misallocation of public support for R&D, hence government policy failure, with the potential to exacerbate preexisting market failures. Initially, we explore alternative allocation mechanisms for public support, which can help to minimize the scale of these government policy failures. Of these mechanisms (grants, tax credits, or allocation rules based on past performance), our results suggest that none is universally most efficient. Rather, the effectiveness of each allocation rule depends on the severity of financial constraints and on the level of innovative capabilities of the firms themselves. ; ACCEPTED ; peer-reviewed

AbstractIn this paper, we investigate how the innovation expectations of public financiers are related to realized patents. The analysis is based on a novel data set of collaborative R&D projects subsidized by the Finnish Agency of Technology and Innovation (Tekes) and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) during the period 2000–2004. Innovation expectations are measured using reports submitted by Tekes experts during ex ante assessments of projects. Our probit model results reveal that Tekes' patent expectations are positively related to realized patents for projects led by private firms (but not by public organizations). For large organizations, Tekes' innovation expectations are better at predicting patenting.