This study provides the first absolute income mobility estimates for postwar Germany. Using various micro data sources, we uncover a steep decline in absolute mobility rates from 81 percent to 59 percent for children's birth cohorts 1962 through 1988. This trend is robust across different ages,...

Most previous studies on intergenerational transmission of human capital are restricted to two generations - between the parent and the child generation. In this paper we investigate if there is an independent effect of the grandparent and the great grandparent generations in this process. We...

Equality of opportunity has been one of the central ideas governing education policy in the Nordic welfare state. This paper takes its starting point in the shared history of educational reform in the Nordic countries, and presents evidence that the comprehensive school reforms that implied a...

This paper studies effects of education policy on early fertility. We study a major educational reform in Sweden in which vocational tracks in upper secondary school were prolonged from two to three years and the curricula were made more academic. Our identification strategy takes advantage of...

In this paper, preferences for income redistribution in Switzerland are elicited through a Discrete Choice Experiment (DCE) performed in 2008. In addition to the amount of redistribution as a share of GDP, attributes also included its uses (working poor, the unemployed, old-age pensioners,...

This paper explores the determinants of individual well-being as measured by self-reported levels of satisfaction with income. Making full use of the panel data nature of the German Socio-Economic Panel, we provide empirical evidence for well-being depending on absolute and on relative levels of...