The Finnish comprehensive school reform replaced the old two-track school system with a uniform nine-year comprehensive school and significantly reduced the degree of heterogeneity in the Finnish primary and secondary education. We estimate the effect of this reform on the test scores in the...

This paper estimates the effect of a major education reform on the intergenerational income mobility in Finland. The Finnish comprehensive school reform of 1972-1977 replaced the old two-track school system with a uniform nine-year comprehensive school and significantly reduced the degree of...

We propose a strategy for assessing how the inflow to the disability insurance program has been governed over time. We analyze the ex-ante health of individuals entering the program, compared to individuals not entering the program in the same year, by using ex-post mortality. Applying the...

We propose a general test for exogeneity that is robust against distributional misspecification. The test can also be used to identify other types of misspecifications, such as the presence of a random coefficient. The idea is to sort the data with respect to a variable (a sorting score) and...

This paper estimates the effects of early interventions in the Swedish sickness insurance system. The aim of the interventions is to screen and, further to, rehabilitate sick listed individuals. We find that the early interventions – in contrast to what is expected – increase the inflow into...

During the last decade several empirical studies have stressed the importance of norms and social interactions for explaining sickness absence behavior. In this context public discussions about the intentions of the insurance, and of the rights and duties of the receivers, may be important for...

Abadie and Imbens (2008, Econometrica) showed that classical bootstrap schemes fail to provide correct inference for K-nearest neighbour (KNN) matching estimators of average causal effects. This is an interesting result showing that bootstrap should not be applied without theoretical...

We compare the income and wage trajectories of women in relation to their male partners before and after parenthood. Focusing on the within-couple gap allows us to control for both observed and unobserved attributes of the spouse and to estimate both short-and long-term effects of entering...

This study investigates possible reasons for the gender difference in sickness absence. We estimate both short- and long-term effects of parenthood in a within-couple analysis based on the timing of parenthood. We find that after entering parenthood, women increase their sickness absence by...

We estimate a labor supply model on a random sample of Swedish male and female blue collar workers to study the effect of economic incentives on work absence behavior. We observe work absence for each day during 1990 and 1991 for each worker in the sample. We use non-parametric (Kaplan-Meier)...