We study the effect of salience in the social security benefit system on labor earnings by exploiting kinks and notches in budget lines introduced by earnings testing and social security accrual mechanisms for 67-69 year old workers in Norway. An earnings test had large effects on labor...

We examine the potential causal effect of years of schooling on the use of public disability pensions by studying the extension of compulsory schooling introduced in Norway in the 1960s. Simple regressions of disability pension receipt on schooling suggest a very strong negative relationship...

Dynamic discrete-choice models have been an important tool in studies of state dependence in benefit receipt. An assumption of such models is that benefit receipt sequences follow a conditional Markov process. This property has implications for how estimated period-to-period benefit transition...

We study the relationship between early claiming of pensions and incentives in the highly flexible Norwegian public pension system, measuring incentives to claim based on an estimated model for expected longevity. Despite a strong correlation between incentives and claiming decisions, the...

The national Norwegian school reform of 1994, which gave statutory right to at least three years of upper secondary education, had a significant impact on educational attainment among immigrant youth. In particular, we find that the immigrant transition rate from compulsory schooling to...

Econometric duration data are typically interval-censored, that is, not directly observed, but observed to fall within a known interval. Known non-parametric identification results for duration models with unobserved heterogeneity rely crucially on exact observation of durations at a continuous...

This paper develops the important distinction between tilted and simple importance sampling as methods for simulating likelihood functions for use in simulated maximum likelihood. It is shown that tilted importance sampling removes a lower bound to simulation error for given importance sample...