We examine theoretically and empirically social interactions in labor markets and how policy prescriptions can change dramatically when there are social interactions present. Spillover effects increase labor supply and conformity effects make labor supply perfectly inelastic at a reference group...

This paper argues that public holidays facilitate the co-ordination of leisure time but do not constrain the annual amount of leisure. Public holidays therefore have benefits both in the utility of leisure on holidays and (by enabling people to maintain social contacts more easily) in increasing...

In many countries, sickness absence financed by generous insurance benefits has become an important concern in the policy debate. It turns out that there are strong variations in absence behavior between local geographical areas, and it has been difficult to explain these variations by...

OECD countries faced largely divergent employment rates during the last decades. But the whole bulk of the cross-national and cross-temporal heterogeneity relies on specific demographic groups: prime-age women and younger and older individuals. This paper argues that family labor supply...

This paper analyzes to what extent parental leave decisions of mothers with young children depend on the decisions made by their coworkers. The identification of peer effects, which are defined as indirect effects of the behavior of a social reference group on individual outcomes, bears various...

This paper analyzes to what extent parental leave decisions of mothers with young children depend on the decisions made by their coworkers. The identification of peer effects, which are defined as indirect effects of the behavior of a social reference group on individual outcomes, bears various...

This study analyses whether the role of religion for employment of married women in Europe has changed over time and along women's life cycles. Using information on 44'000 married European women from the World Values Survey 1981-2013, we find that in OECD-Europe there is little difference among...

This paper explores a novel mechanism of gender identity formation. Specifically, we explore how the work behavior of a teenager's own mother, as well as that of her friends' mothers, affect her work decisions in adulthood. The first mechanism is commonly included in economic models. The second,...

We provide the first empirical application of a new approach proposed by Lee (2007) to estimate peer effects in a linear-in-means model. This approach allows to control for group-level unobservables and to solve the reflection problem. We investigate peer effects in student achievement in...

Social comparisons are an essential source of information about the self. Research in social psychology has shown individual variation in the tendency toward comparison with other people's opinions and abilities, raising the question of whether social comparisons are driven by psychological...