We examine the evolution of the Swedish wage distribution over the periods 1968-1981 and 1981-2000. The first period was the heyday of the Swedish solidarity wage policy with strongly equalization clauses in the central wage agreements. During the second period, there was more scope for...

Derek Neal (JPE 2004) used the NLSY79 to show that the observed median log wage gap between young white and young black women in 1990 underestimated the true, selection-corrected gap, i.e., the gap we would have expected to see had all of these women been employed in 1990. In this paper, we use...

We consider the problem of sequential search when the decision to stop searching is made by a committee. We show that a symmetric stationary equilibrium exists and is unique given that the distribution of rewards is log concave. Committee members set a lower acceptance threshold than do...

We analyze a model of directed search in which unemployed job seekers observe all posted wages. We allow for the possibility of multiple applications by workers and ex post competition among vacancies. For any number of applications, there is a unique symmetric equilibrium in which vacancies...

The Swedish adult education program known as the Knowledge Lift is unprecedented in its size and scope, aiming to raise the skill level of all low-skilled workers towards the medium level. This paper evaluates the effects of program participation on individual labor market outcomes, notably...

The Swedish adult education program known as the Knowledge Lift (1997-2002) was unprecedented in its size and scope, aiming to raise the skill level of large numbers of lowskill workers. This paper evaluates the potential effects of this program on aggregate labor market outcomes. This is done...

We show that in a search/matching model with endogenous participation in which workers are heterogeneous with respect to market productivity, satisfying the Hosios rule leads to excessive vacancy creation. The reason is that the marginal worker does not internalize the effect of his or her...

In many economies, there is substantial economic activity in the informal sector, beyond the reach of government policy. Labor market policies, which by definition apply only to the formal sector, can have important spillover effects on the informal sector. The relative sizes of the informal and...

In this paper, we present a directed search model of the housing market. The pricing mechanism we analyze reflects the way houses are bought and sold in the United States. Our model is consistent with the observation that houses are sometimes sold above, sometimes below and sometimes at the...

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...