The business cycle is likely to be of importance for self-employment rates. When the economy is growing, business opportunities open up and encourage the setup of new firms. In downturns, self-employment may be a way to avoid unemployment. The strength of these pull and push factors may depend...

We present evidence on whether managerial entrenchment affects workers’ pay, using a large panel dataset that matches public firms with detailed data on their subsidiaries and workers. We find that CEOs with a stronger grip on control pay their workers higher wages, but CEO ownership of cash...

Analyzing a large panel that matches public firms with worker-level data, we find that managerial entrenchment affects workers' pay. CEOs with more control pay their workers more, but financial incentives through ownership of cash flow rights mitigate such behavior. These findings do not seem to...

We study the effect of child care costs on the fertility behavior of Swedish women and find that reductions in child care charges influence fertility decisions, even when costs are initially highly subsidized. Exploiting the exogenous variation in child care costs caused by a Swedish child care...

We examine the effect of corruption on foreign direct investment (FDI). Starting out from the theory of FDI, we show that corruption can have different effects on horizontal investments, which are primarily aimed at sales to the local market, compared with vertical investments, which are made to...

Theories of taste-based discrimination predict that competitive pressures will drive discriminatory behaviour out of the market. Using detailed matched employer-employee data, we analyze how firm takeovers and product market competition are related to the gender composition of the firm’s...

In this paper, we empirically address the hypothesis that there is a relationship between the supply of human capital and the rate and direction of skill-biased technical change (SBTC). Using country- and industry-level data on OECD countries, we find R&D to be positively related to the supply...