Outlines the current state of evaluation research in Sweden. Concludes that it is limited in scope relative to the USA despite the much larger expenditure on labour market policies in Sweden. Locates this deficiency in the differential research infrastructure of the two countries.

Using the 1968, 1981, and 2000 Swedish Level of Living Surveys, the authors examine the evolution of the wage distribution in Sweden over the periods 1968–1981 and 1981–2000. The first period was the heyday of the Swedish solidarity wage policy with strong equalization clauses in...

This paper uses Swedish register data to examine four classical outcomes in empirical labor economics: IQ, noncognitive skills, years of schooling and long-run earnings. We estimate sibling correlations – and the variance components that define the sibling correlation – in these outcomes. We...

This paper presents new evidence on intergenerational mobility at the top of the income and earnings distributions. Using a large dataset of matched father-son pairs in Sweden, we find that intergenerational transmission is very strong at the top, more so for income than for earnings. At the...

We investigate if the association between family background and income in Sweden has changed for men born between 1932 and 1968. Our main finding is that the share of the variance in long-run income that is attributable to family background, the so-called brother correlation in income, has...

We use unique Swedish data with information on adopted children's biological and adoptive parents to estimate intergenerational mobility associations in earnings and education. We argue that the impact from biological parents captures broad prebirth factors, including genes and prenatal...

This paper examines the evolution of economic inequality in Sweden before, during and after the major macro-economic recession in the early 1990s. Earnings and income inequality increased after the downturn, but government safety net programs buttressed disposable income for those with low...