We study the impact on children of increasing maternity leave benefits using a reform that increased paid and unpaid maternity leave in Norway in July 1977. Mothers giving birth before this date were eligible only for 12 weeks of unpaid leave, while those giving birth after were entitled to 4...

This paper uses a unique data set with nearly career-long earnings histories to provide evidence on the returns to schooling in current and lifetime earnings. We use these results to assess the importance of life-cycle bias in earnings regressions using current earnings as a proxy for lifetime...

Parents influence their children's adult outcomes through economic and genetic endowments, transmission of cultural values and social skills, and through choice of residential location. Using a variance decomposition framework which provides bounds on the effect of families and neighbourhoods,...

We show that cyclical skill mismatch, defined as mismatch between the skills supplied by college graduates and skills demanded by hiring industries, is an important mechanism behind persistent career loss from graduating in recessions. Using Norwegian data, we find a strong countercyclical...

We study the impact of increasing the time that the mother spends with her child in the first year of her life. In particular, we examine a reform that increased paid and unpaid maternity leave entitlements in Norway. In response to this reform, maternal leave increased on average by 4 months...

We develop an equilibrium model of wages and estimate it using administrative data from Norway. Coworkers interact through a task-assignment model, and wages are determined through multi-lateral bargaining over the surplus that accrues to the workforce. Seniority affects wages through workplace...

Using a variance decomposition framework that bounds the effect of families and neighbourhoods, we find important effects of family characteristics and residential location on adult education and earnings in Norway. Neighbourhoods are less important than families, as the correlations among...