The objective of this essay is to study to what extent parents divide their estates unequally between their children and the determinants of this decision. We use a new dataset based on the estate reports for almost 70,000 Swedish widows, widowers, divorcees and unmarried individuals who died...

This essay contributes in two ways to the literature on the effects of economic circumstances on health. First, it deals with reverse causality and omitted variable bias by exploiting exogenous variation in inherited wealth generated by the unexpected repeal of the Swedish inheritance tax....

No abstract.

We study sex trafficking in a marriage market model of prostitution. When traffickers can coerce women to sell sex, trafficked prostitutes constitute a non-zero share of supply in any unregulated market for sex. We ask if regulation can eradicate trafficking and restore the equilibrium that...

Existing uncertainties about the correct explanations for economic growth and business cycles cannot be settled by aggregative analysis within the neoclassical framework. Current disputes in theory rest largely on ad hoc, casually empirical, assumptions about departures from perfect rationality...

The role of school principals largely resembles that of corporate managers and the leadership they provide are often viewed as a crucial component for educational success. We estimate the impact of individual principals on various schooling outcomes, by constructing a principal-school panel data...

We analyze the evolution of cultural traits when parents purposefully invest resources in order to socialize their children to the cultural traits that maximize child lifetime utility. We assume that children are not passive in their adoption of traits from peers. Instead they are guided by an...

The paper shows how prolonged price inertia can arise in a macroeconomic system in which there are temporary price rigidities as well as production lags in the use of intermediate goods. In this context, changes in production demand - generated, say, by changes in the money supply - have...

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...

The paper analyzes the effects on the demand for owner-occupied housing that are likely to result from the Swedish 1983-85 tax reform. This is done by means of a micro-simulation model which takes into account the dichotomous nature of the demand for housing: the consumers choose the mode of...