In Sweden, a trust-based system of school performance evaluation meets a market-oriented school system with liberal entry conditions for voucher-funded private providers. National standardized tests are graded at the local school and what ultimately matters to students are teacher-set grades....

A large and growing empirical literature has presented evidence of job polarization, i.e. the simultaneous growth of high-wage jobs and low-wage jobs at the expense of middle-wage jobs. Thus far, the focus has been on employment in different occupations, without taking into account the role of...

We study the effect of child care costs on the fertility behavior of Swedish women and find that reductions in child care charges influence fertility decisions, even when costs are initially highly subsidized. Exploiting the exogenous variation in child care costs caused by a Swedish child care...

We document a significant increase in the sorting of workers by cognitive and non-cognitive skills across Swedish firms between 1986 and 2008. The weight of the evidence suggests that the increase in sorting is due to stronger complementarities between worker skills and technology. In...