The way that unemployment duration affects employment prospects, is investigated using Norwegian micro transition data encompassing detailed accounts of 14 807 unemployed adults. A generalized non-proportional Weibull model is estimated, with two possible exits from the unemployment pool: a job...

To identify relative wage impacts of immigration, we make use of licensing requirements in the Norwegian construction sector that give rise to exogenous variation in immigrant employment shares across trades. Individual panel data reveal substantially lower wage growth for workers in trades with...

While integration policies typically focus on labor market entry, we present evidence showing that immigrants from low‐income countries tend to have more precarious jobs, and face more severe consequences of job loss, than natives. For immigrant workers in the Norwegian private sector, the...

We evaluate the impact on youth crime of a welfare reform that tightened activation requirements for social assistance clients. The evaluation strategy exploits administrative individual data in combination with geographically differentiated implementation of the reform. We find that the reform...

Despite important policy implications associated with the allocation of education resources, evidence on the effectiveness of school inputs remains inconclusive. In part, this is due to endogenous allocation; families sort themselves non-randomly into school districts and school districts...

Using a matched employer-employee data set for Norway, we exploit rare information on the union status of both individual employees and their workplaces. We establish two key results. First, we find a positive effect of workplace trade union density on the level of the individual's pay in...

We evaluate the impact of labour market programmes on unemployment durations in Norway, by means of a distribution-free mixed proportional competing risks hazard rate model. We find that programme participation, once completed, improves employment prospects, but that there is often an...

Failure to account for differences between immigrants and natives in their responsiveness to changes in macroeconomic conditions may bias estimates of assimilation effects on immigrant earnings. Using Norwegian register data from 1980 to 1996, we first establish that earnings of immigrants from...