This paper estimates the effect of a major education reform on the intergenerational income mobility in Finland. The Finnish comprehensive school reform of 1972-1977 replaced the old two-track school system with a uniform nine-year comprehensive school and significantly reduced the degree of...

This paper formulates a simple skill and education model to illustrate how better access to higher education can lead to stronger assortative mating on skills of parents and more polarized skill and earnings distributions of children. Swedish data show that in the second half of the 20th century...

We study the role of family wealth for children's educational achievement using novel and unique Swedish register data. In particular, we focus on the relationship between grandparents' wealth and their grandchildren's educational achievement. Doing so allows us to reliably establish the...

Much of the political economy analysis of reform focuses on the conflict of interest between groups that stand to gain or lose from the competing policy proposals. In reality, there is also a lot of disagreement about the working of the policy: in addition to conflicting interests, conflicting...

This paper examines the differential effects of mother's schooling and father's schooling on the acquisition of schooling by their offspring. It does this in a 'cross-cultural' context by comparing results across three countries: Germany, Hungary and the Former Soviet Union. It looks within...

The speed at which immigrants assimilate is the subject of debate. Human capital formation plays a major role in this discussion. This paper compares the educational attainment of second generation immigrants to those of natives in the same age cohort. Evidence using a large German data set...

A rich data set gives a unique opportunity to study heterogeneity in intergenerational mobility. Here, we explore whether the intergenerational association in education and income is the same for children with different results in a cognitive ability test (the Swedish Military Enlistment test)....

Family background shapes individual outcomes throughout life. While the existing literature documents how the importance of family background, typically measured by the degree of sibling correlation in socioeconomic outcomes, varies across countries, less is known about heterogeneities across...

Girls typically have higher grades than boys in school and recent research suggests that part of this gender difference may be due to discrimination of boys. We rigorously test this in a field experiment where a random sample of the same tests in the Swedish language is subject to blind and...