This paper formulates a simple skill and education model to explain how better access to higher education leads 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 more...

Promoting entrepreneurship has become an increasingly important part of the policy agenda in many countries. The success of such policies, however, rests in part on the assumption that entrepreneurship outcomes are not fully determined at a young age by factors that are unrelated to current...

The literature of Equality of Opportunity (EOp) has long acknowledged the existence of 'talents', 'innate ability' or 'genetic ability'. Nonetheless, attempts to explicitly incorporate a measure of innate ability in the quantification of EOp have been rare. On the other hand, the literature of...

I offer a way out of the Taubman-Goldberger controversy on the public policy (ir)relevance of heritability studies by arguing for a quasi-experimentally controlled comparison of the estimates that these studies provide. If the environments individuals are exposed to are under such control,...

In this paper, we investigate one factor that can directly contribute to-as well as indirectly shed light on the other causes of-the gender gap in academic publishing: length of peer review. Using detailed administrative data from an economics field journal, we find that, conditional on...

Labor markets in Western countries are becoming more and more flexible, thereby meeting the needs of employers. Yet the new flexibility also offers opportunities to workers, while at the same time bears the risk of long-term exclusion. This paper deals with unequal chances on the contemporary...

We study labor market dynamics of workers in a highly competitive industry, focusing on the relationship between workers' age, wages, and productivity. Our analysis uncovers an inverse U-shaped relationship. While some wage adjustments occur within the current firm, job mobility plays a crucial...

We apply a partial identification analysis using comprehensive Norwegian register data to investigate the causal effect of father's income on child income. We find a strong association between the incomes of fathers and children. The causal effect, however, equals at least 1% and at most 51% of...

We analyse the evolving impact of family background on educational attainment using administrative data on 2,417,460 individuals from 1,341,403 families born in the Netherlands between 1966 and 1995. Comparisons between parents and their children reveal intergenerational elasticities between...

Does participation in a social assistance program by parents have spillovers on their children's own participation, future labor market attachment, and human capital investments? While intergenerational concerns have figured prominently in policy debates for decades, causal evidence is scarce...