Sorting of high-ability workers is a main source of urban-rural disparities in economic outcomes. Less is known about when such human capital sorting occurs and who it involves. Using data on 15 cohorts of university graduates in Sweden, we demonstrate significant sorting to urban regions on...

This paper empirically tests the hypothesis that landed elites may block technological change and economic development if they fear that they will lose future political power (Acemoglu and Robinson (2002, 2006, and 2012). It exploits a plausible exogenous change in the distribution of political...

The world is in the midst of a new wave of privatization, with record dollar amounts raised in both developed and developing countries.Using rich Swedish registry data covering two decades from the mid-1990s, we show that privatizations increased unemployment incidence by almost a fifth, and...

We evaluate the impact on earnings, pensions, and further labor market outcomes of two parallel educational reforms increasing instructional time in Swedish primary school. The reforms extended the annual term length and compulsory schooling by comparable amounts. We find striking differences in...

Private equity buyouts have sparked debates among labor unions and worker representatives on how they affect workers. This chapter provides an overview of academic evidence on how private equity buyouts affect workers. We review the theoretical reasons why employees could be affected and then...

This paper examines whether recent advancements in automation and robotics have affected intergenerational income mobility. Using detailed data on all individuals and firms registered in Sweden, we study whether parental exposure to robots at the occupational level and heterogeneous adoption of...

In this study, we examine the relationship between within-firm pay inequality and employee productivity. We use hand-collected data on a sample of S&P 1500 companies from 2018-2022 and find a concave relationship between the relative CEO pay and employee productivity. Consistent with tournament...

We investigate the returns to cognitive ability in the labor and capital markets. Using population-wide Swedish military enlistment data and administrative tax records, we find that cognitive ability is much better at predicting capital income than labor earnings. The difference is almost a...

Our use of longitudinal register data combined with a unique survey allows us to offer a more comprehensive picture of rural self-employment than in previous studies. We find that selfemployed in rural settings are more likely than those in metropolitan regions to employ others, but...

We examine immigrant self-employment in Sweden during 2011-2021 - a turbulent decade with a large influx of refugees into the country and the outbreak of the global COVID-19 pandemic. Four outcome variables are investigated: the probability of self-employment, the probability of entry into and...