There is a scarcity of women and minorities at the apex of political power. This paper formalizes the concept of the glass ceiling for political organizations and builds on previous research to suggest four testable criteria. A glass ceiling exists if women and/or racial minorities (1) are...

A large literature has studied the context that affects women’s numerical representation, but few have moved beyond numbers to study the drivers of a gender gap in political influence among elected politicians. Using panel data for the careers of 35.000 Swedish municipal politicians over six...

We use a Swedish sickness insurance reform to show that among married couples a partner’s benefit level affects spousal labour supply. The spousal elasticity of sick days with respect to the partner’s benefit is estimated to be 0.4, which is about one-fourth of the own labor supply...

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...

Centralized wage-setting institutions compress relative wages. Motivated by this fact, we investigate the effects of centralized wage setting on the industry distribution of employment. We examine Sweden's industry distribution from 1960 to 1994 and compare it to the U.S. distribution over the...

Centralized wage-setting institutions compress relative wages. Motivated by this fact, we investigate the effects of centralized wage setting on the industry distribution of employment. We examine Sweden's industry distribution from 1960 to 1994 and compare it to the U.S. distribution over the...

What were the asserted complementarities between the welfare state and full-employment policies, and why do these complementarities look less convincing today?

How do we explain the poor employment performance in Western Europe since about the-1970s? This question is in fact twofold : What initiated the dramatic rise in employment, and waht mechanisms have made it continue for so long? My attemps to answer these questions from the basis for a...

This paper shows that the liberalisation of foreign direct investment (FDI) tends to make the effect of labour costs on domestic investment and labour demand more negative.