Estimates of the effect of education on GDP (the social return) have been hard to reconcile with micro evidence on the private return to schooling. We present a simple explanation combining two ideas: imperfect substitution and endogenous skill-biased technological progress and use cross-country...

See the publication in the 'Journal of Applied Econometrics' (2014).<P> We estimate the impulse response function (IRF) of GDP toa banking crisis, applying an extension of the local projectionsmethod developed in Jorda (2005). This method is shown to bemore robust to misspecification than...</p>

The stock market collapse led to political tensions between generations due to the fuzzy definition of the property rights over the pension funds’ wealth. The problem is best resolved by the introduction of generational accounts. Modern consumption and portfolio theory shows that the younger...

This study documents two empirical regularities, using data for Denmark and Portugal. First, workers who are hired last, are the first to leave the firm (Last In, First Out; LIFO). Second, workers’ wages rise with seniority (= a worker’s tenure relative to the tenure of her colleagues). We...

We develop a model of an economy with several regions, which differ in scale. Within each region, workers have to search for a job-type that matches their skill. They face a trade-off between match quality and the cost of extended search. This trade-off differs between regions, because search is...

Do people move to cities because of marriage market considerations? In citiessingles can meet more potential partners than in rural areas. Singles are thereforeprepared to pay a premium in terms of higher housing prices. Once married, themarriage market benefits disappear while the housing...

Is moving to the countryside a credible commitment device for couples? Weinvestigate whether lowering the arrival rate of potential alternative partners bymoving to a less populated area lowers the dissolution risk for a sample of Danishcouples. We find that of the couples who married in the...

There has been much attention for the causes of the increase in wageinequality in the United States since the mid seventies. DiNardo,Fortin, and Lemieux (1996) showed that minimum wages can explain 25%. The present paper uses a more general approach requiring noassumptions on how minimum wages...

Published in <A href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9442.2010.01613.x/abstract">The Scandinavian Journal of Economics"</A>, 112(3), 618-39.<P>The perpetual inventory method used for the construction of education data per country leads to systematic measurement error. This paper analyses the effect of this measurement error on GDP regressions. There is a systematic...</p></a>

While the employment effects of minimum wages are usually reported to be small (suggesting low substitutability between skill types), direct estimates suggest a much larger degree of substitutability. This paper argues that this paradox is largely due to a bias induced by the aggregation of...