Many welfare-to-work programs in both North America and Europe are directed at making work pay for the low skilled. This paper identifies two alternative policies that are motivated by this same objective - active labour market programs that involve wage subsidies together with improved job...

Religious leaders sometimes condemn progressive social norms. In this paper, I revisit David Hume's hypothesis that secular states can "bribe" churches into adopting less strict religious doctrines. The hypothesis is difficult to test due to reverse causality: more liberal theologies may attract...

We introduce a structural model which jointly estimates the full-time wage premium and female labor supply, using the piecewise-linear budget constraint method. Our model incorporates a discontinuous budget line at cut-off hours (35 hours a week), caused by the coexistence of both full- and...

The incidence of Cesarean deliveries (CDs) has been on the rise. The procedure's cost and benefits are discussed controversially; in particular, since non-medically indicated cases seem widespread. We study the effect of CDs on subsequent fertility and maternal labor supply. Identification is...

This paper introduces a new IV strategy based on IVF (in vitro fertilization) induced fertility variation among childless women to estimate the causal effect of having children on their career. For this purpose, we use administrative data on IVF treated women in Denmark. Because observed chances...

We use quasi-random variation in graduation years during the onset of a very deep national recession to study the relationship between early labor market conditions and young females' family formation outcomes. A policy-pilot affecting the length of upper-secondary education in Swedish...

The labor supply effects of becoming a grandmother are not well established in the empirical literature. We estimate the effect of becoming a grandmother on the labor supply decision of older workers. Under the assumption that grandmothers cannot predict the exact date of conception of their...

The labor supply effects of becoming a grandmother are not well established in the empirical literature. We estimate the effect of becoming a grandmother on the labor supply decision of older workers. Under the assumption that grandmothers cannot predict the exact date of conception of their...

Obesity is increasing worldwide for both adults and children. Genetic disposition is responsible for some variation in body weight but cannot explain the dramatic increase in the last two decades. The increase must be due to structural and behavioral changes. One such behavioral change is the...

This paper extends the nonparametric method to estimate labor supply developed by Blomquist and Newey (2002) to handle cases in which there are individuals who do not work. The method is then applied to married women in Sweden from 1973 to 1999. For 1999, I find an aggregate uncompensated wage...