Economic theory suggests that incentives matter for people's decisions. This paper investigates whether this also holds for less self-evident areas of life such as the timing of births. We make use of a natural experiment when the German government changed its parental benefit system January 1,...

Our objective is to study the dynamics of the wealth distribution over the path of economic development. More specifically, we are interested in distinguishing between changes which seem to be country specific and characteristics shared by all countries. A historical account of the evolution of...

We study three necessary conditions for work sharing to increase employment. First, there must exist a negative long-run relation between working time and employment. Second, hours per worker must be exogenous with respect to wages and employment. Third, policy makers must be able to influence...

The objective of this paper is to study the long term effects of policy measures for displaced workers. Our focus is on the individuals affected by the closure of the Uddevalla Shipyard in western Sweden in 1985 and the cutbacks at the LKAB mines in northern Sweden in 1983. These workers not...

Who is wealthy? This paper presents empirical estimates of household movements into and out of the top percents of the wealth distribution over individual life cycles. There are life-cycle motives and precautionary motives for wealth accumulation. The opportunities to accumulate wealth create...

Parents' transfer motives are important for understanding, e.g., macroeconomics, income (re)distribution, savings, and public finance. Using data from six biennial waves of the Health and Retirement Study 1992-2002, we estimate grouped tobit-type latent variable models with multi-level error...

The objective of this paper is to empirically study if and to what extent people legally reduce their tax payments. There are few empirical studies of tax avoidance although avoidance may seriously affect the possibilities to raise tax revenue. I use a sample of Swedish siblings receiving...