It is extraordinarily difficult to determine the extent to which the gender wage gap reflects discriminatory behaviors by employers or differences in productive capacities between men and women. We note that where piece-rate work is performed, wages should in principle reflect productivity...

It is extraordinarily difficult to determine the extent to which the gender wage gap reflects discriminatory behaviors by employers or differences in productive capacities between men and women. We note that where piece-rate work is performed, wages should in principle reflect productivity...

This paper studies how cognitive and social skills in childhood are related to the duration of unemployment in adolescence and early adulthood. I estimate a flexible proportional hazard rate model for the probability of making a transition from unemployment to employment during an individual’s...

Self-employment is often used as synonymous with entrepreneurship. We define entrepreneurship as having the ambition to grow or innovate. As part of a large and representative survey in Sweden, business owners were asked to self-identify as either entrepreneurs or self-employed. The survey in...

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...

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...

No abstract.