Reorganization of public utilities is on the current political agenda in many European countries. However, in many cases the most fundamental question in terms of public policy towards these industries is not tested; does the underlying cost structure indicate a natural monopoly or not? Evans and...

Declining fertility is often attributed to the increased education of women. It is difficult to establish a causal link because both fertility and education have changed secularly. In this paper we study the connection between fertility and education using educational reform as an instrument to...

This paper analyses the effect of aspects of family background, such as family income and parental education, on the educational attainment of persons born from 1967 to 1972. Family income is measured at different periods of a child's life to separate long-term versus short-term effects of...

In this paper we analyze the pattern of employment adjustment at the plant level using a rich data set for Norway. We first document the stylized facts about employment changes in small and large plants. The data reveals important differences across size classes. In particular, episodes of zero...

Trade and technology-related explanations for the change in plant-level skill composition in Norway are examined by exploiting matched employer-employee data. The results show that the changes are taking place mainly through a reallocation of labour resources between plants within sectors,...

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...

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...