The literature on social networks often presumes that job search through (strong) social ties leads to increased inequality by providing privileged individuals with access to more attractive labor market opportunities. We assess this presumption in the context of sorting between AKM-style person...

The paper studies how social connections affect firm-level hiring decisions and performance. We characterize the social connections of firms' employees using register data and for causal identification we use job displacements, which create directed positive shocks towards connected firms by...

The paper studies how social job finding networks affect firms' selection of employees and the setting of entry wages. Our point of departure is the Montgomery (1991) model of employee referrals which suggests that it is optimal for firms to hire new workers through referrals from their most...

We test the hypothesis that political training (experiences of debates, negotiations, coalition-building, etc.) in voluntary associations increases the probability of becoming a candidate in public elections. We apply a regression discontinuity design, comparing bare winners and bare losers in...

We study how employee sickness absence affects worker-firm matching. We build on the idea that firms are sensitive to absence in jobs with few substitutes (unique positions). Consistent with this, we show that unique employees are less absent conditional on individual characteristics,...

This paper measures the job-search responses to the COVID-19 pandemic using realtime data on vacancy postings and job ad views on Sweden's largest online job board. First, new vacancy postings drop by 40%, similar to the US. Second, job seekers respond by searching less intensively, to the...