We provide a common set of life-cycle earnings statistics using administrative data from the United States, Canada, Denmark and Sweden. Three qualitative patterns are common across countries: (1) the earnings distribution above the median fans out with age, (2) the extreme right tail of the...

Using very detailed register data on cognitive abilities and productive personality traits for nearly all Swedish males at age 18, we show that employment in the recent past has shifted towards skill-intensive occupations. Employment growth is monotonically skill biased in relation to this set...

Wage setting models typically posit a tight relationship between the generosity of unemployment insurance (UI) and equilibrium wages. This paper estimates the effect of UI on workers' wages. I build on a unique feature of the unemployment policy in Sweden, where workers can opt to buy supplement...

According to EU-law, third country national labour migrants shall be treated equally to local workers with regard to wages. The aim of this working paper is to clarify whether Swedish law meets this demand with regard to highly qualified labour migrants. The analysis reveals that the combined...

Despite a global trend of wage decentralization over the past 30 years, we know very little about the labor market implications of decentralized wage determination. A main reason is the lack of exogenous variation in wage regulation linked to detailed outcome data. Using Swedish registry data...

We examine the direct impact of idiosyncratic match quality on entry wages and job mobility using unique data on worker talents matched to job-indicators and individual wages. Tenured workers are clustered in jobs with high job-specific returns to their types of talents. We therefore measure...

We show that officer training during the Swedish military service has a strong positive effect on the probability to attain a managerial position later in life. The most intense type of officer training increases the probability of becoming a civilian manager by about 5 percentage points, or 75...

In this paper, we update and extend "Is There a Glass Ceiling in Sweden?" (Albrecht et al. 2003) by documenting the extent to which the gender log wage gap across the distribution in Sweden has changed over the period 1998-2008. We then examine the Swedish glass ceiling in 2008 in more detail by...

We study the effects of introducing a performance-based promotion program for teachers in Sweden. The program intended to make the teaching profession more attractive by raising wages for skilled teachers and taking advantage of teachers' professional competence. Our results show that: (i)...

During the first 10 years in the Swedish labor market, male university graduates experience a faster wage growth than their female counterparts. This paper investigates the role of job mobility and upward occupational mobility in explaining the gender gap in early career wage growth. The...