A growing number of studies in several countries over the past twenty years have documented the persistence in incomes across generations, and much of the current literature is seeking to understand the processes driving intergenerational mobility and how these differ across time periods and across countries. Education is commonly seen, just as in sociological studies of social mobility or stat...

This paper examines the importance of workers’ outside options in the wage determination. In a model of search and bargaining, holding the marginal product constant, a worker’s wage is determined by a weighted average of the wages in alternate jobs, turning the wage formation into a social interaction problem. I develop a search and bargaining model with heterogeneous workers and propose novel ...

This paper examines unionism’s relationship to the size of the middle class and its relationship to intergenerational mobility. Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) 1985 and 2011 files are used to examine the change in the share of workers in a middle-income group (defined by persons having incomes within 50 percent of the median) and use a shift-share decomposition to explore how the decline ...

Using a large longitudinal data set, we study the effects of increased trade on earnings and mobility in the Swedish labor market in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Earnings respond significantly to changes in industry sales, whether generated by domestic market forces or international trade: Swedish exports (imports) raise (lower) annual earnings, but changes in trade affect earnings just as a...

On the Emergence of Toyboys: Equilibrium Matching with Ageing and Uncertain Careers Toyboy marriages (where the female partner is at least 5 years older than her male partner) have grown threefold since the 1970s in the United States and Britain. This paper examines this phenomenon using an equilibrium search framework in which becoming successful in the labour market takes time and fitness dec...

First and Second Generation Immigrant Educational Attainment and Labor Market Outcomes: A Comparison of the United States and Canada The educational and labor market outcomes of the first, first-and-a-half, second and third generations of immigrants to the United States and Canada are compared. These countries’ immigration flows have large differences in source countries, scale and timing, and ...

Family Background, Self-Confidence and Economic Outcomes In this paper we analyze the role played by self-confidence, modeled as beliefs about one’s ability, in shaping task choices. We propose a model in which fully rational agents exploit all the available information to update their beliefs using Bayes’ rule, eventually learning their true type. We show that when the learning process does no...

Most R&D projects fail from a commercial point of view, and technological shifts may quickly turn even successful innovations into failure. It is, however, possible that projects which fail commercially produce knowledge with some social value. Such knowledge is likely to be embodied in workers or teams of workers, and in order to evaluate the social returns to research, it is desirable to trac...

In this paper I study the long-term effects of inter-municipal moving during childhood on income using Swedish register data. Due to the richness of the data I am able to control for important sources of selection into moving, such as parent separation, parents’ unemployment, education, long run income, and immigration background. I find that children’s long run incomes are significantly negati...

Applied research on the association between parent and child lifetime income is relying on income data that covers only part of the life cycle which may lead to misleading estimates of the intergenerational elasticity (IGE). In this paper I study the bias of IGE estimates for different missing-data scenarios based on simulated income processes. Using an income process from the income dynamics a...