This paper examines whether children are better off if their parents have stronger social networks. Using data on high-school friendships of parents, we analyze whether the number and characteristics of friends affect the labor-market outcomes of children. While parental friendships formed in...

This paper formulates a simple skill and education model to explain how better access to higher education leads to stronger assortative mating on skills of parents and more polarized skill and earnings distributions of children. Swedish data show that in the second half of the 20th century more...

Wage decompositions suggest that a large share of the gender wage gap can be explained by differences in occupation and employer choices. If female workers are not well informed about these pay differences, increasing wage transparency might alleviate the gender gap. We test this hypothesis by...

We conduct a field experiment to evaluate the effectiveness of labor market speeddates where unemployed workers meet temporary employment agencies. Our analysis shows that participation in such events increases immediate job finding by 6-7 percentage points. In the subsequent months, employment...

This study uses data from the largest Austrian job board to examine labor-demand responses in the first months after the start of the COVID lockdown in March 2020. Our analysis shows that the number of job postings declined by a third and remained low even when implemented restrictions were...

Despite changing gender norms, few fathers decide to take parental leave after the birth of a child, and when they do, their leave spells are substantially shorter compared to mothers. This study examines how paternal leave-taking is affected by two key features of leave policies: flexibility in...

This study examines the effect of two recent parental leave reforms in Austria that allow parents to choose leave schemes with varying duration. Using a regression discontinuity design, we find that the introduction of more flexible scheme choices led mothers to take, on average, 1-2 months less...

We test whether different empirical methods give different results when evaluating job-search assistance programs. Budgetary problems at the Dutch unemployment insurance (UI) administration in March 2010, caused a sharp drop in the availability of these programs. Using administrative data...

In this paper we focus on the role of caseworkers in the assignment and take-up of welfare-to-work programs. We conduct a field experiment that generates exogenous variation in the assignment to different policy regimes to caseworkers. The experiment allows us to provide evidence on the...

This paper uses administrative data from 16 cohorts of the Dutch population to study the relationship between field of study and family outcomes. We first document considerable variation by field of study for a range of family outcomes. To get to causal effects, we use admission lotteries that...