Almost 70 economists from across Europe gathered in Helsinki on 21–22 August 2025 for the third Workshop in Labor Economics: Wages, Employment and Inequality (WEI 2025). The two-day event featured keynote lectures by Stephen Machin (LSE) and Magne Mogstad (University of Chicago), alongside a rich programme of sessions and flash talks presenting recent research. Discussions focused on wages, employment, and inequality, with lively exchanges between senior and early-career researchers underscoring the workshop’s reputation as one of the high-quality forums in labor economics in Europe.
Kimmo Palanne defends his dissertation, Essays on Transportation and the Environment, at Aalto University on March 21, 2025. The research indicates that lowering public transport fares in the Helsinki metropolitan area reduced car use and CO2 emissions. However, the measure was expensive in terms of cost per tonne of CO2 reduced compared to other climate actions.
Only a small fraction of retail trade companies opted to pay newly hired workers under the age of 25 subminimum wages, after policy change. This finding suggests that prevailing wage norms significantly influence firms’ wage setting.
According to a recent study, Finnish Home Care Allowance has negative effects especially on mothers as well as children. The effects are due to the nature of Home Care Allowance: it not only is a transfer of income but also guides the parents’ decisions to remain home with their children for longer periods, reducing their employment.
The study contributes to the existing literature on the matter by considering the effects of Finnish home care allowance program on long-term working careers, in addition to the short-term effects. The study contributes by looking at both short- and medium-term outcomes on mothers and children in the same institutional setting. Finally, the data from child health clinics on children are unique and have not been used in prior research.
