International migration flows largely reflect demographic patterns and economic opportunities. Migration flows increase in expected income and other pull factors in potential destinations, and in push factors in the origin, like high unemployment, low wages, and high population growth. Migration...

Gender differences in labor force participation are exceptionally small in Nordic countries. We investigate how couples emigrating from Denmark self-select and sort into different destinations and whether couples pursue the dual-earner model, in which both partners work, when abroad. Female...

We present and test a theory of prospective and retrospective pocketbook voting. Focusing on two large reforms in Sweden, we establish a causal chain from policies to sizeable individual gains and losses and then to voting. The Social Democrats proposed budget cuts affecting parents with young...

We analyze a two-period modell where risk-averse students divide their time between risky education, leisure, and work. The educated can migrate. Wagetax financed transfer to students acts as an insurance, and increases both investment in education and demand for leisure. We drive sufficient...

In earlier literature, the suggested Pareto improvements in pay-as-you-go (PAYG) systems have relied on the presence of externalities or the possibility of intragenerational redistribution. We show that neither assumption is necessary in an economy with intergenerational trade in a fixed factor...

We propose a dynamic general equilibrium model with human capital accumulation to evaluate the economic consequences of compulsory services (such as military draft or social services). Our analysis identifies a so far ignored dynamic cost arising from distortions in time allocation over the...

It may be in the interest of low-ability individuals to subsidize the education of high-ability individuals. Sufficient conditions are surprisingly mild: positive externalities in education and complementarity in production between human capital and labor supllied by the low-ability individuals....

While the effect of social security systems on retirement decisions has received much attention, the impact of these systems on individuals incentives to invest in their human capital has not been analyzed. We integrate human capital investment and retirement decisions in a simple analytical...

It has been argued that in the absence of altruism, intergenerational transfers can survive only if the old are net recipients. I prove that this need not hold in an over-lapping generations model with a fixed factor. For example, the middle-aged owning land may gain by providing public...

We study the efficiency and distributional consequences of establishing and abolishing the draft in a dynamic model with overlapping generations, taking into account endogenous human capital formation as well as government budget constraints. The introduction of the draft initially benefits the...