In an economy with distortionary taxes on labor, can subsidies on day care, financed by an increase in taxes, raise welfare by encouraging women with small children to work? We show, within a heterogeneous-agent life-cycle framework, that the Ramsey optimal policy consists in equalizing...

This paper decomposes the rise in cross-sectional earnings inequality in Sweden between 1990 and 2002 into changes in market prices of observable characteristics, changes in the composition of the labor force across demographic groups and industries, and changes in unobservables, and compares...

Swedish census data and tax records reveal an astonishing wage compression; the Swedish skill premium fell by more than 30 percent between 1970 and 1990 while the U.S. skill premium, after an initial decline in the 1970s, rose by 8--10 percent. Since then both skill premia have increased by...

We document a clear increase in Swedish earnings inequality in the early 1990s. Inequality in disposable income and earnings net of taxes and transfers also increased, but much less than the increased inequality in pre-government earnings. These different developments are most likely explained...

The labor-supply elasticity is a central element in many macroeconomic models. We argue that assumptions underlying previous econometric estimates of the intertemporal labor supply elasticity are inconsistent with incomplete markets economies. In particular, if the econometrician ignores...

We use the neoclassical growth framework to model international capital flows in an economy with exogenous demographic change. We compare model implications and actual current account data and find that the model explains a small but significant fraction of capital flows between OECD countries,...