Children with lower socioeconomic status (SES) tend to benefit more from early child care, but are substantially less likely to be enrolled. We study whether reducing behavioral barriers in the application process increases enrollment in child care for lower-SES children. In our RCT in Germany...

In this paper we develop a model for tax amnesty applications in a multi-period setting. One key insight from the model is that applying for amnesty becomes more attractive at the moment when stricter enforcement is announced, even if the implementation of the policy is in the distant future. We...

What do the education premiums look like over the life cycle? What is the impact of schooling on lifetime earnings? How does the internal rate of return compare with opportunity cost of funds? To what extent do progressive taxes attenuate the incentives to invest in education? This paper...

Using survey data and the instrument developed by Barsky et al. (1997), we estimate the distribution of attitudes towards income risk in a country where many employment and health-related risks are generously covered by a tax financed social insurance system (Norway 2006). Under a CRRA...

This paper provides evidence on the returns to schooling in current and lifetime earnings. We use these results to assess the importance of life-cycle bias in earnings regressions using current earnings as proxy for lifetime earnings. To account for the endogeneity of schooling, we apply three...

We demonstrate how age-adjusted inequality measures can be used to evaluate whether changes in inequality over time are because of changes in the age structure. In particular, we explore the hypothesis that the substantial rise in earnings inequality since the early 1980s is driven by the large...

Using choices among hypothetical income lotteries from respondents to a large Norwegian survey, we analyse the association between attitudes towards risks and socio-economic characteristics by means of an ordered probit model. Next, we impute a risk aversion measure to every respondent and use...

Using quasi-random assignment of criminal cases to judges, we estimate large incarceration spillovers in criminal and brother networks. When a defendant is sent to prison, there are 51 and 32 percentage point reductions in the probability his criminal network members and younger brothers will be...

Understanding whether, and in what situations, time spent in prison is criminogenic or preventive has proven challenging due to data availability and correlated unobservables. This paper overcomes these challenges in the context of Norway’s criminal justice system, offering new insights into...