Bertrand et al. (2015) show that among married couples in the US, the distribution of the share of the household income earned by the wife exhibits a sharp drop just to the right of .50. They argue that this drop is consistent with a social norm prescribing that a man should earn more than his...

Two common hypotheses regarding the relative benefits of vocational versus general education are (1) that vocational skills enhance relative short-term earnings and (2) that general skills enhance relative long-term earnings. Empirical evidence for these hypotheses has remained limited. Based on...

In 2007, a tax discount reform in Sweden reduced prices of outsourced domestic services (ODS) by 50 percent. Unlike most previous studies, population register data enable us to directly link a proxy for relaxed time constraints, annual changes in households' tax discounts, to changes in...

We analyze the association between inequality and growth across 72 labor market regions in Sweden 1990-2006. Highly accurate measures of growth and inequality (gini, Q3, p9075, p5010) are derived from population register data. The regional set-up also reduces problems with omitted variable bias...

This paper evaluates the effects on unemployment in Sweden of the Adult Education Initiative (AEI) which during its run from 1997 to 2002 offered adult education to the unemployed at compulsory or upper secondary level. The AEI is compared with the vocational part of Labor Market Training (LMT)...

This paper studies whether specialized academic fields of study in secondary school, which are common in many countries, affect earnings as an adult. Identification is challenging, because it requires not just quasi-random variation into fields of study, but also an accounting of individuals'...

We assess selection bias in estimated returns to workplace training by exploiting a field experiment with random assignment of workers to a one-week training program. We compare experimental estimates of this program with non-experimental estimates that are estimated by using a sample of agents...