Documents Jakobsen, Vibeke 3 results

"The article explores the extent to which the organization of vocational tracks in upper secondary school affects the labour market risks associated with early school exit. The Nordic countries share many features, but the upper secondary school systems differ significantly in how their vocational tracks are organized. Denmark and Norway have dual vocational tracks, that is, they combine school-based education and workplace apprenticeships, whereas in Finland and Sweden they are primarily school based. We analyse administrative longitudinal data from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s in the four countries and find the highest vocational track dropout rates in Norway and the lowest in Finland. The results indicate that the relative labour market effect of dropping out from a vocational track is most detrimental in Norway. It is also in Norway that we find the greatest gender differences in this respect."

" The focus of this paper is on poverty among immigrants and refugees aged 60 years and older coming to Denmark from countries outside of the OECD, with an emphasis on immigrants who came as guest workers before 1974, as refugees and as family members and marriage partners (tied movers) of the individuals coming as guest workers and as refugees. A large proportion of people in this group were fairly young at the time of their arrival in Denmark. Guest workers who came before 1974 and refugees and tied movers who arrived in the 1970s and 1980s are now either close to or above the age of 60, with conditional eligibility to a labour market-related early retirement programme or to the State pension. Poverty rates by national background are described using alternative household concepts. A number of background factors with relevance for poverty are summarised. We focus on age, gender, marital status, occupational status at age 55, and duration of residence, and find major differences between migrant groups and between immigrants and natives regarding how income is dependent at different ages on market income, pensions and benefits. We also present a number of regressions aiming at explaining differences in the risk of poverty risk in terms of these background factors."

"Social assistance benefits are the last resort in national social protection systems, and decentralizing reforms leading to increasing local discretion over implementation of national legislation was an international trend frequently referred to as devolution. More recent reforms have instead often implied recentralization and/or involved mandatory institutional cooperation between welfare agencies located at different hierarchical levels. In contrast to North America, there is little European evidence on the extent to which shifting responsibilities influence benefit levels and benefit receipt. Using individual level register data from Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden and applying a difference-in-difference approach, we link changes in legislation to changes in municipal benefits as well as caseloads during the period 1990–2010. We only find indications of reform effects linked to distinct benefit centralization, concluding that other reforms were too insubstantial to have an impact. Combined with earlier evidence, this suggests that in order to have an impact, welfare reform requires marked changes in authority. "