Despite well-documented convergence during the later years of the 20th century, labor force attachment remains markedly higher for men than for women. The current paper employs rich longitudinal registry data to investigate the intergenerational transfer of the gender gap in labor force...

We identify the causal effect of lump-sum severance payments on non-employment duration in Norway by exploiting a discontinuity in eligibility at age 50. We find that a severance payment worth 1.2 months’ earnings at the median lowers the fraction re-employed after a year by seven percentage...