This paper evaluates the impact of a recent Norwegian family-policy reform on the labour supply of native and three groups of immigrant women in Norway. The reform provides cash benefits to families with one- to three-year-old children, who do not utilize state-subsidized day-care centres. We...

Paid maternity leave has gained greater salience in the past few decades as mothers have increasingly entered the workforce. Indeed, the median number of weeks of paid leave to mothers among OECD countries was 14 in 1980, but had risen to 42 by 2011. We assess the case for paid maternity leave,...

An important feature of parental leave in Norway is that it allows significant sharing of leave between parents. Parents may take 54 weeks of leave and receive 80 per cent of previous earnings or 44 weeks of leave with 100 per cent of earnings, up to a ceiling amount. Nine weeks of total leave...

Marital splits may affect the economic well-being of families with children significantly. We study the economic effects of divorce in such families in Norway, using administrative information on more than 60,000 individuals. In the typical case, where the mother has custody, the mother (and...

We look at private-provision-of-public goods games. These games share an assumption that family members non-cooperatively use their resources either to acquire a private good or a family-specific good. What exactly constitutes the "private good" and the "public good" will be seen to vary from...

Norwegian registry data is used to investigate the location decisions of a full population cohort of young adults as they complete their education, establish separate households and form their own families. We find that the labor market opportunities and family ties of both partners affect these...

Using rich administrative data from Norway, we evaluate a 1998 work-encouraging reform targeted at single parents. We especially focus on educational performances for children of the involved single mothers. For all children of single mothers, the effect on school grades at completion of junior...

In several European countries, a paternity quota has been introduced as part of paid parental leave to provide incentives for fathers to increase their child care responsibilities and household involvement.In this paper, we explore the introduction of the first paternity quota in Norway in 1993....

The influence of peers could play an important role in the take up of social programs. However, estimating peer effects has proven challenging given the problems of reflection, correlated unobservables, and endogenous group membership. We overcome these identification issues in the context of...

This paper studies the effect of improved neonatal health care on mortality and long run academic achievement in school. We use the idea that medical treatments often follow rules of thumb for assigning care to patients, such as the classification of Very Low Birth Weight (VLBW), which assigns...