This paper investigates to what extent students in higher education respond to financial incentives by adjusting their study behavior. Students in Norway who completed certain graduate study programs between autumn 1990 and 1995 on stipulated time were entitled to a restitution of approximately...

Using a comprehensive administrative database we exploit independent quasiexperimental methods to estimate the effect of class size on student achievement in Norway. The first method is based on a maximum class size rule in the spirit Angrist and Lavy (1999). The second method exploits...

Recent theoretical contributions have emphasized the favorable incentive effects of property taxation. The object of this paper is to confront these theories with Norwegian data on student performance. The institutional setting in Norway is well suited to analyzing the effects of property...

This paper examines whether children are better off if their parents have stronger social networks. Using data on high-school friendships of parents, we analyze whether the number and characteristics of friends affect the labor-market outcomes of children. While parental friendships formed in...

We study the earnings of transsexuals using Dutch administrative labor force data. First, we compare transsexuals to other women and men, and find that transsexuals earn more than women and less than men. Second, we compare transsexuals before and after transition using worker fixed effects...

It is an established fact that gay men earn less than other men and lesbian women earn more than other women. In this paper we study whether differences in competitive preferences, which have emerged as a likely determinant of labour market differences between men and women, can provide a...

The authors adopt the Five-Factor Model of personality structure to explore how personalityaffected the earnings of a large group of men and women who graduated from Wisconsin highschools in 1957 and were re-interviewed in 1992. All five basic traits–extroversion,...

We explore the adoption data approach to estimating causal effects of parental education and income on the same outcomes of their children. Thanks to a data set drawn from Swedish population registers with detailed information on biological background and history of adoptees, we can test basic...

This paper uses the Five-Factor Model of personality structure as an organizing framework to explore the effects of personality on earnings. Using data from a longitudinal survey of American high school graduates, we find that extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism and...

The problem with most intergenerational mobility estimates is that unmeasured and inherited abilities prevent us from drawing inferences. In this paper we estimate the intergenerational mobility of schooling and exploit differences between adopted and own birth children to obtain genetically...