Sweden has obligatory sickness and disability insurance which is both financed (from payroll taxes) and administered by the government. In order to receive sickness benefits, insured individuals must have certificates issued by a medical doctor. Since health care is administered at the county...

The identification of average causal effects of a treatment in observational studies is typically based either on the unconfoundedness assumption or on the availability of an instrument. When available, instruments may also be used to test for the unconfoundedness assumption (exogeneity of the...

We study how economic incentives affect labor force exit through different income security programs, old-age pensions as well as income taxes in Sweden. We use the option value for staying in the labor force as a measure of economic incentives and estimate an econometric model for the choice of...

This study evaluates the long-term cost of unemployment in Finland by focusing on the deep recession period of the early 1990s. The number of plant closures increased sharply during the recession and the unemployment rate rose by more than 13 percentage points. In the analysis, prime working-age...

This paper studies the causal effect of the timing of first birth on highly educated women’s career outcomes using exogenous variation in first birth timing induced by the occurrence of pregnancy loss before first birth. Contrasting previous findings, my results suggest that a one-year delay...

This paper analyzes the consequences of the spacing of births for women’s subsequent labor income and wages. Spacing births in longer intervals may allow women to re-enter the labor market between childbearing events, thereby avoiding expanded work interruptions and, in turn, reducing the...

We investigate the effects of meetings between the unemployed and their case workers on the transition rate from unemployment to employment using detailed Danish event history data obtained from administrative registers. We find large positive effects of meetings. The transition rate strongly...