The impact of compulsory schooling laws as well as the abolition of early selection by ability remain important issues in the educational debate. These issues were the focus of a major education reform in Sweden which was implemented in the 60s. The reform was preceded by a ``social experiment''...

The motivations underlying the pursuit of college prestige in Japan presumes a labor market that rewards workers according to the quality of the college that they attended. Yet, studies that examine the relationship between college quality and earnings in Japan remain few and riddled with...

Swedish census data and tax records reveal an astonishing wage compression; the Swedish skill premium fell by more than 30 percent between 1970 and 1990 while the U.S. skill premium, after an initial decline in the 1970s, rose by 8--10 percent. Since then both skill premia have increased by...

This paper decomposes the rise in cross-sectional earnings inequality in Sweden between 1990 and 2002 into changes in market prices of observable characteristics, changes in the composition of the labor force across demographic groups and industries, and changes in unobservables, and compares...

Chung and Cox (1994) provided an intuitively appealing stochastic model which indicates that superstars may exist regardless of talent and which gives rise to the Yule distribution. We adopt a different empirical approach and test its goodness-of-fit using a parametric bootstrap and several...