Rapid growth in productivity combined with increasing wage dispersion in some countries, notably Anglo-Saxon, has been the subject of numerous studies. The main hypothesis in the literature is that an increased skill premium provides a link between productivity growth and inequality. If this...

In the Norwegian fabricated metal industry there has been a shift in demand from unskilled to skilled workers during the period 1972 to 1990, and relative demand for white collar employees has also increased. The paper analyses the factors behind the shift in the composition of these three kinds...

Considering the high female part-time rates in Norway, one may envisage a sizeable additional labour supply if more part-time working women would switch to full time. In view of an ageing population and increased demand for labour in the future, we investigate this issue by studying married and...

Expected earnings are considered to influence individuals' choice of education. However, the presence of nonpecuniary attributes and the different choice set available to prospective students make identification of this relationship difficult. This paper employs a conditional logit model on...

This paper uses a unique data set with nearly career-long earnings histories to provide evidence on the returns to schooling in current and lifetime earnings. We use these results to assess the importance of life-cycle bias in earnings regressions using current earnings as a proxy for lifetime...

Why do individuals choose different types of post-secondary education, and what are the labor market consequences of those choices? We show that answering these questions is difficult because individuals choose between several unordered alternatives. Even with a valid instrument for every type...

Public R&D subsidies aim to target particularly risky R&D and R&D with large externalities. One would expect many such projects to fail from a commercial point of view, but they may still produce knowledge with social value. Such knowledge is likely to be embodied in workers or teams of workers....

This paper analyzes the (re)entry of Norwegian mothers into full-time and part-time employment following the first and second birth. Based on theories of job search and human capital depreciation and appreciation a semi-parametric hazard model is estimated, expressing the entry rate as a...

Do wage differences between workers with high and low levels of education, between males and females and between workers with different levels of experience reflect differences in productivity? We address this set of questions on the basis of a data set with variables for individual workers...

This paper investigates whether returns to experience and seniority vary between workers with different levels of education and between different types of firms. Using a large administrative dataset for Norwegian manufacturing, I find that more educated workers have higher experience and...