In this paper, I first show that Swedish job polarization is - contrary to common belief - a long-run phenomenon: the share of middle-wage jobs has declined relative to the highest- and lowest-paid jobs since at least the 1950s. Based on previous results for the US, I then demonstrate that the...

Earlier studies on income inequality and crime have typically used total income or total earnings. However, it is quite likely that it is changes in permanent rather than in transitory income that affects crime rates. The purpose of this paper is therefore to disentangle the two effects by,...

We present new evidence on the influence of income inequality on generalized trust. Using individual panel data from Swedish counties together with an instrumental variable strategy, we find that differences in disposable income, and especially differences among people in the bottom half of the...

Employing econometric methods for univariate time series, this paper investigates the empirical validity of assuming a unit root in individuals' labor-income processes. Using a Swedish register-based longitudinal dataset which allows us to follow a cohort of workers from 1968 to 2005, we are...

Using a large Swedish longitudinal database for the period 1982-2005, I estimate and compare within-group inequality in persistent and transitory earnings among men with high-school and college degrees. Analyses of inequality over the life cycle reveal that experience-variance profiles of...

The informational value of the aggregate US unemployment rate has recently been questioned because of a unit root in the labor-force participation rate; the lack of mean reversion implies that long-run changes in unemployment rates are highly unlikely to reflect long-run changes in joblessness....

This paper investigates the connection between the Swedish wage profile of net job creation and Autor, Levy, and Murnane's (2003) proposed substitutability between routine tasks and technology. We first show that between 1975 and 2005, Sweden exhibited a pattern of job polarization with...