We use administrative data on Swedish lottery players to estimate the causal impact of wealth on players' own health and their children's health and developmental outcomes. Our estimation sample is large, virtually free of attrition, and allows us to control for the factors such as the number of...

Historically, the American armed forces were disproportionally drawn from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. A transition toward a smaller and more selective military has changed this tendency. Since the armed forces do not gather data on recruits’ family income, previous studies relied on...

How important for success on the job is uninterrupted labor force participation? Data on labor force status for a 15 year period for individual salaried employees in Swedish Industry makes possible the estimation of the effect of years of experience and years of non-experience on earnings. One...

No abstract.

We combine two empirical observations in a general equilibrium occupational choice model. The first is that entrepreneurs have more control than employees over the employment of and accruals from assets, such as human capital. The second observation is that entrepreneurs enjoy higher returns to...

We use data from the military enlistment for a large representative sample of Swedish men to assess the importance of cognitive and noncognitive ability for labor market outcomes. The measure of noncognitive ability is based on a personal interview conducted by a psychologist. Unlike...

Attention is called to a little explored scarce resource, named 'economic competence', which combines features of human capital and bounded rationality, and can be defined as the non-transferable abilities of economic agents to employ transferable information for deciding about the use of scarce...

Can educational institutions explain occupational choice between wage employment and entrepreneurship? This paper follows Lazear's (2005) Jack-of-all-trades hypothesis according to which an individual with a more balanced set of abilities is more likely to enter into entrepreneurship. In the...

The analysis provides a new explanation for two widespread problems concerning European unemployment policy: the disappointingly small effect of many past reform measures on unemployment, and the political difficulties in implementing more extensive reform programs. We argue that the heart of...