Experiments, where prospective participants are randomly assigned into experimental and control groups, are often regarded as the ideal approach to evaluation of manpower policies. This examination shows that such experimental designs can yield misleading and incomplete information about program...

Microdata are used in this paper to analyze the effects of unemployment on mental health. The analysis is done in two steps. First, cross-section data of labor force participants are analyzed. It appears that the unemployed have worse mental health than the employed. Next, panel data are used to...

This paper analyses whether the commonly found negative relationship between parental separation in childhood and educational outcomes is causal or due mainly to selection. We use data on about 100,000 Swedish full biological siblings, born in 1948-63, and perform cross-section and...

We develop methods and employ similar sample restrictions to analyse differences in intergenerational earnings mobility across the United States, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. We examine earnings mobility among pairs of fathers and sons as well as fathers and daughters...

We explore the adoption data approach to estimating causal effects of parental education and income on the same outcomes of their children. Thanks to a data set drawn from Swedish population registers with detailed information on biological background and history of adoptees, we can test basic...

This paper examines the evolution of economic inequality in Sweden before, during and after the major macro-economic recession in the early 1990s. Earnings and income inequality increased after the downturn, but government safety net programs buttressed disposable income for those with low...

Using data from 1998, we show that the gender log wage gap in Sweden increases throughout the wage distribution and accelerates in the upper tail of the distribution, which we interpret as a glass ceiling effect. Using earlier data, we show that the same pattern held at the beginning of the...

We use unique Swedish data with information on adopted children's biological and adoptive parents to estimate intergenerational mobility associations in earnings and education. We argue that the impact from biological parents captures broad prebirth factors, including genes and prenatal...

In every society for which we have data, people’s educational achievement is positively correlated with their parents’ education or with other indicators of their parents’ socioeconomic status. This topic is central in social science, and there is no doubt that research has intensified...