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...

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...

The constraint on informal finance is commonly taken to be high costs and limited supply. But the majority of informal investors – family and friends – is often willing to supply funds at negative returns, and yet many borrowers tap family and friends only as a last resort. We explain this...

Existing studies of entrepreneurship focus on entrepreneurs whose individual contribution to wealth creation is typically trivial: self-employed persons. This paper investigates entrepreneurs whose individual contribution to wealth creation is enormous: billionaires. We explore the relationship...

This paper reconsiders the predominant typology pioneered by Baumol (1990) between productive, unproductive and destructive entrepreneurship. Baumol’s classificatory scheme is built around a limited concept of first-best outcomes and therefore easily fails to appreciate the true impact of...

We test whether people’s tendency to stick with the default option can help save resources. In a natural field experiment we switch printers’ default settings, from simplex to duplex printing, at a large Swedish university. The results confirm that roughly one third of all printing is...

Users of the social networking service Facebook have the possibility to post status updates for their friends to read. In turn, friends may react to these short messages by writing comments or by pressing a Like button to show their appreciation. Making use of five Swedish accounts, we set up a...

This paper examines the job finding methods of different ethnic groups in the UK. The theoretical framework shows that less assimilated ethnic unemployed workers are more likely to use their friends and family as their main method of search but they have less chance of finding a job using this...

The Todaro Paradox states that policies aimed at reducing urban unemployment are bound to backfire: they will raise rather than reduce urban unemployment. The aim of this paper is to reexamine this paradox in the context of efficiency wage and search-matching models. For that, we study a policy...

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...