This paper examines the relationship between individuals' personal exposure to economic conditions and their investment choices in the context of human capital. Focusing on bachelor's degree recipients, we find that birth cohorts exposed to higher unemployment rates during typical schooling...

The large sibling correlations in risky behaviour between siblings raise the possibility that adolescents may directly influence the actions of their brothers or sisters. We assess the extent to which correlations in substance use and selling drugs are causal. Our identification strategy relies...

We explore the extent to which the huge race gap in wealth can be explained with properly constructed income and demographic variables. In some instances we explain the entire wealth gap with income and demographics provided that we estimate the wealth model on a sample of whites. However, we...

This paper uses a college-by-graduate degree fixed effects estimator to evaluate the returns to 19 different graduate degrees for men and women. We find substantial variation across degrees, and evidence that OLS over-estimates the returns to degrees with the highest average earnings and...

This paper analyzes earnings inequality and earnings dynamics in Sweden over 1985- 2016. The deep recession in the early 1990s marks a historic turning point with a massive increase in earnings inequality and earnings volatility, and the impact of the recession and the recovery from it lasted...

We specify and estimate a lifecycle model of consumption, housing demand and labor supply in an environment where individuals may file for bankruptcy or default on their mortgage. Uncertainty in the model is driven by house price shocks, education specific productivity shocks, and catastrophic...

This report provides a description of the first wave of household data collected for a randomised field experiment in Bosnia. The study intends to measure the impact of microcredit on poverty reduction among Bosnian households and the development of small enterprises that may otherwise not have...

This paper assesses the impact of Swedish welfare-to-work programmes on labour market performance including wages, labour market status, unemployment duration and future welfare-to-work participation. We develop a structural dynamic model of labour supply which incorporates detailed...

We consider the identification of the average treatment effect in models with continuous endogenous variables whose impact is heterogeneous. We derive a testable restriction that allows us to assess the degree of unobserved heterogeneity. Our analysis uses assumptions relating to the Local...

This paper analyzes the career progression of skilled and unskilled workers, with a focus on how careers are affected by economic downturns and whether formal skills, acquired early on, can shield workers from the effect of recessions. Using detailed administrative data for Germany for numerous...