Using a Difference-in-Differences approach, we evaluate the effects of a 10 percentage point reduction in the payroll tax introduced in 2002 in northern Sweden. We find no employment effects among firms existing both before and after the reform, whereas the average wage bill per employee...

Using a Difference-in-Differences approach we evaluate the effects of a 10 percentage points reduction in the payroll tax introduced in 2002 for firms in the northern part of Sweden. We find no employment effects for existing firms and can rule out that a 1 percentage point payroll tax reduction...

In Europe, accounting standards prevent larger expenditures on employer-sponsored training from being treated as investments. Using Sweden as example, we discuss two consequences for training. <p> First, the timing: training will be conducted when income is large enough for training costs to be...</p>

Investigating the robustness of the skill-biased technical change hypothesis, this analysis incorporates two novel features. First, effective labor is modeled as the product of a quantity measure - number of employees with a given level of education - and a quality index, depending on, i.a.,...

When schooling is measured with error and data on ability are lacking, return to schooling estimates will be subject to positive omitted variable bias (OVB) and negative measurement error bias (MEB). We investigate how these biases are affected when ability is proxied by family background...

In Europe, accounting standards prevent larger expenditures on employer-sponsored training from being treated as investments. Using Sweden as example, we discuss two consequences for training. First, the timing: training will be conducted when income is large enough for training costs to be...

Investigating the robustness of the skill-biased technical change hypothesis, this analysis incorporates two novel features. First, effective labor is modeled as the product of a quantity measure - number of employees with a given level of education - and a quality index, depending on, i.a.,...

Investment in human capital is a central issue in the literature on economic growth. The purpose of this study is to shed light on the economic incentives for investment in university education across countries. An empirical investigation of earnings for private-sector engineers and business...

In this paper we describe how restricted vector autoregressions can be employed to examine the sources of macroeconomic fluctuations. We show how cointegration restrictions can be used to identify a VAR system with common stochastic trends subject to transitory and permanent changes in average...

Productivity measurement is considered in the context of incomplete output information. Only a value measure of output is assumed to be available, which is typical for many service industries. Input markets are assumed to be competitive, while the output market is allowed to be noncompetitive,...