Documents Korpi,Tomas 5 results

" One feature of the global economy in recent years has been the increasing number and importance of new investment funds (private equity (PE), hedge funds (HFs), and sovereign wealth funds (SWFs)), which are sometimes referred to as alternative investment funds (AIFs). This increase has paralleled fundamental changes in financial markets and has generated heated debates on the impact of these funds on restructuring practices, employment levels and industrial relations. This report present the results of a project that brought together researchers from several European countries to assess the effects of investment funds on labour outcomes."

"The widespread trend towards greater social inequality increasingly, if belatedly, became a policy preoccupation in the years immediately preceding the outbreak of the crisis. Sluggish growth, high unemployment and fiscal constraints suggest that the situation is likely to worsen further in the coming years. Against this background, this, the sixth ETUI Policy Brief European Economic and Employment Policy in 2010, written by Prof. Tomas Korpi from Stockholm University, recalls a widely disregarded finding of earlier research: inequality can be split up into a longer-term and a short-run component. Inequality is higher, all else equal, if individuals' short-run earnings fluctuations are larger."

"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. "

"A recurrent finding in on‐the‐job training research is the ‘training gap' in formal training: the positive correlation between initial education and continuing training. This finding is here examined from the perspective of two important distinctions: (i) between employee skill supply and job skill demand and (ii) between formal and informal training. Less‐educated workers may hold jobs with low skill requirements demanding little further formal training because the use of high skills is irrelevant, jobs that moreover provide little informal training. Exploring these issues on representative Swedish survey data using the educational mismatch (overqualified, the rightly qualified and the underqualified) model, we find that job requirements are strongly correlated with the incidence of both formal and informal training. Rather than, as has previously been argued, employee training decisions being the cause of the gap, this suggests that employer decisions regarding how to structure jobs and whom to hire are the primary factors behind the training gap."