This study investigates the effect of parental unemployment on children’s school performance. We use individual level data for all children completing lower secondary school in Sweden in 1990 directly moving on to three years of upper secondary school. We control for family and individual...

In this paper, we examine whether adult education delays retirement and increases labour force participation among the elderly, a mechanism suggested in the OECD strategy for “active ageing” and the “Lisbon strategy” of the EU. Using register data from Sweden, we analyse transcripts from...

For several decades after WWII, Swedish education reforms were justified extensively based on democratic and equality arguments. The Social Democrats, the party in governing power during this era, considered a uniform education system crucial to their endeavors towards a greater democracy and...

More children than ever attend center-based care early in life. We study whether children who attend center-based care before age 3 have better or worse language and motor skills, socio-emotional maturity, and school readiness just before entering primary school. In data covering about 36,000...

The 1991-reform of upper secondary school, in which the two-year vocational programmes were transformed into three-year programmes, was implemented all over the country in 1995/96. The reform was piloted in the final years of the 1980s. The pilot scheme is an example of a “natural...

In Sweden adult secondary education (ASE) has been offered since 1968, but we know little about its labour market effects. ASE offers courses at the compulsory and upper secondary level and is aimed to give adults who lack these types of education. This paper provides the first long-run annual...

The Finnish comprehensive school reform replaced the old two-track school system with a uniform nine-year comprehensive school and significantly reduced the degree of heterogeneity in the Finnish primary and secondary education. We estimate the effect of this reform on the test scores in the...

To examine the macro economic effects of government tax and punishment policies, this paper develops a three-sector general quilibrium model featuring matching frictions, heterogenous abilities and an informal sector with tax evasion. The choice of education is determined endogenously. Job...

This paper studies the effects of school choice on segregation. We analyze the effect of a reform in Stockholm that changed the admission system of public upper secondary schools. Before the year 2000, students had priority to the school situated closest to where they lived, but from the fall of...

We study how the duration of paid parental leave affects the accumulation of cognitive skills among children. We use a reform which extended parental leave benefits from 12 to 15 months for Swedish children born after August 1988 to evaluate the effects of prolonged parental leave on...