We study how the duration of paid parental leave affects the accumulation of cognitive skills among children. We use a reform which extended parental leave benefits from 12 to 15 months for Swedish children born after August 1988 to evaluate the effects of prolonged parental leave on children's...

Anonymous application procedures (AAP) are increasingly promoted as a way to combat employment discrimination. The idea gets support from theory and experimental evidence, but virtually nothing is known about its real-life effects. We present empirical evidence building on micro data collected...

We examine the direct impact of idiosyncratic match quality on entry wages and job mobility using unique data on worker talents matched to job-indicators and individual wages. Tenured workers are clustered in jobs with high job-specific returns to their types of talents. We therefore measure...

Skilled and educated women have on average fewer children and are more likely to remain childless than the less skilled and educated. Using rich Swedish register data, we show that these negative associations found in most previous studies largely disappear if we remove the impact of family...

The paper uses a quasi-experimental situation to analyze the effects of career interruptions on future labor market outcomes. Data are generated by a Swedish program that granted career breaks to applicants until funds where exhausted. Comparing approved and declined (due to lack of funds)...

This paper estimates the effects on earnings of “gap years” between high school and university enrollment. The effect is estimated by means of standard earnings functions augmented to account for gap years and a rich set of control variables using administrative Swedish data. We find that...

The conditions under which young workers find their first real post-graduation jobs are both very important for the young's future careers and insufficiently known given their public policy implications. To study these conditions, and in particular the role played by networks, we use a Swedish...

The paper studies how social job finding networks affect firms' selection of employees and the setting of entry wages. Our point of departure is the Montgomery (1991) model of employee referrals which suggests that it is optimal for firms to hire new workers through referrals from their most...

This paper estimates the effects on earnings of "gap years" between high school and university enrollment. The effect is estimated by means of standard earnings functions augmented to account for gap years and a rich set of control variables using administrative Swedish data. We find that...

We study how leadership experiences before labor market entry affect subsequent labor market performance, using a regression discontinuity design to isolate the causal effects. The design is applied to elections of representatives at Swedish student union (SU) councils. Archive data on winning...