Employment-Friendly Welfare Policy and Information Asymmetry: Evidence from Sweden and Korea*

This paper provides a simple theoretical framework for analyzing how welfare polices can affect the incentive to work and compares the recent welfare policy reforms of Sweden and Korea. Sweden has systematically reformed its welfare policies in response to slowing population and economic growth and an aging population. This paper shows that recent Swedish reforms of tax policies and unemployment benefits bear out theoretical predictions that such reforms will help reduce moral hazard and adverse selection problems. In comparison, recent Korean reforms of tax policies and unemployment benefits have focused on moral hazard problems but have largely ignored adverse selection problems.