This paper studies the consequences of the buildup of a new economic sector—the Norwegian petroleum industry—on investment in human capital. We assess both short-term and long-term effects for a broad set of educational margins, by comparing individuals in regions exposed to the new sector...

High school students from non-elite backgrounds are less likely to have peers with elite educated parents than their elite counterparts in Norway. We show this difference in social capital is a key driver of the high intergenerational persistence in elite education. We identify a positive elite...

How does a large structural change to the labor market affect education investments made at young ages? Exploiting differential exposure to the national decline in routine-task intensity across local labor markets, we show that the secular decline in routine tasks causes major shifts in...

Intergenerational persistence in studying for elite education is high across the world. We study the role that exposure to high school peers from elite educated families ('elite peers') plays in driving such a phenomenon in Norway. Using register data on ten cohorts of high school students and...

We analyze whether regional labor markets are affected by expo- sure to import competition from China. We find negative employment effects for low-skilled workers, and observe that low-skilled workers tend to be pushed into unemployment or leave the labor force altogether. We find no evidence of...

What do the education premiums look like over the life cycle? What is the impact of schooling on lifetime earnings? How does the internal rate of return compare with opportunity cost of funds? To what extent do progressive taxes attenuate the incentives to invest in education? This paper...

It is well documented that displaced workers suffer severe earnings losses, but not why this is so. One reason may be that workers are unable or unwilling to move to regions with better employment opportunities. We study this and find that job displacement increases regional mobility but,...

Parents influence their children's adult outcomes through economic and genetic endowments, transmission of cultural values and social skills, and through choice of residential location. Using a variance decomposition framework which provides bounds on the effect of families and neighbourhoods,...

Given the wide use of childcare subsidies across countries, it is surprising how little we know about the effect of these subsidies on children's longer run outcomes. Using a sharp discontinuity in the price of childcare in Norway, we are able to isolate the effects of childcare subsidies on...

We show that cyclical skill mismatch, defined as mismatch between the skills supplied by college graduates and skills demanded by hiring industries, is an important mechanism behind persistent career loss from graduating in recessions. Using Norwegian data, we find a strong countercyclical...