Markus Frölich, Almas Heshmati and Michael Lechner, "A Microeconometric
Evaluation of Rehabilitation of Long-term Sickness in Sweden", Journal of
Applied Econometrics, Vol. 19, No. 3, 2004, pp. 375-396.

The data used in the article are from the Swedish National Social Insurance
Board (Riksförsäkringsverket, RFV). As the data are confidential, they
cannot be made available here. Permission to use this data source should be
directed to RFV (www.rfv.se) 

Utvärderingsavdelningen
(Section for Evaluations)
Head of the Section: Gunnar Johansson
Phone. +46-8-7869550
E-mail: gunnar.johansson@rfv.sfa.se

RFV Data
(Section for Data)
Head of the Section: Sture Hjalmarsson
Phone: +46-60-187054
E-mail: sture.hjalmarsson@rfv.sfa.se


The data are taken from the Riks-LS data set, which has been collected by the
RFV for the purpose of evaluating the efficacy of VR. The survey analysed
retrospectively 75,000 sickness cases, who had received sickness cash
benefit for a period of at least 60 consecutive days between July 1991 and
June 1994. The data were collected as three independent cross-sections
according to the fiscal years, 1991/92, 1992/93 and 1993/94. In each of
these three fiscal years and in each local insurance office, 70 cases were
randomly selected from all sickness cases with at least 60 days duration and
were followed up either until closure of the case or until the data
collection period ended in December 1994. Since the same number of cases
were drawn in each office but the local offices differ in size, sickness
cases occurring in smaller insurance offices are over-represented.

This study is based on 5 counties in Western Sweden with 67 local insurance
offices and a total of 10,309 documented long-term sickness cases. We
ignored individuals with missing values on important variables, individuals
receiving pension benefit at sickness registration, and all individuals in
education or aged above 55 to not confuse rehabilitation with early
retirement intended to ease labour market pressure. Of the remaining 6,287
cases 3,087 had received some form of rehabilitation.

A basic description of the variables in the data set is given in the file
RIKS-LS-description.pdf.

If permission for using the data is obtained from RFV, the data set can be
made available in ASCII, GAUSS, STATA, or SPSS format.

Markus Frölich, University of St. Gallen, markus.froelich@unisg.ch
Almas Heshmati, United Nations University, 
                World Institute for Development Economics Research, 
		almas.heshmati@wider.unu.edu
Michael Lechner, University of St. Gallen, michael.lechner@unisg.ch