Are Risk Aversion and Impatience Related to Cognitive Ability? Is the way that people make risky choices, or tradeoffs over time, related to cognitive ability? This paper investigates whether there is a link between cognitive ability, risk aversion, and impatience, using a representative sample of the population and incentive compatible measures. We conduct choice experiments measuring risk ave...

Employees Who Become Self-Employed: Do Labour Income and Wages Have an Impact? This paper analyzes the self-employment decision among Swedish-born male employees. The main objective of the paper is to investigate the impact of the relation between the actual and the predicted income on the probability to become self-employed. The predicted income is calculated from a standard income regression ...

This paper reports procedures and results obtained from linking marriage registers with the 1851 and 1881 censuses for Birmingham, a major industrial center, and rural areas in Norfolk. The results underscore regional contrasts in mobility processes. Those starting out in Birmingham from unskilled origins whether parental or initial occupation, had quite high probabilities of experiencing upwar...

This policy paper summarizes four corridor studies on bilateral social security agreements (BSSAs) between four European Union (EU) member and two nonmember states, draws conclusions on their results, and offers recommendations. BSSAs between migrant-sending and migrant-receiving countries are seen as the most important instrument to establish portability of social security benefits for interna...

Nature and Nurture in the Intergenerational Transmission of Socioeconomic Status: Evidence from Swedish Children and Their Biological and Rearing Parents This study uses an extraordinary Swedish data set to explore the sources of the intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic status. Merging data from administrative sources and censuses, we investigate the association between sons’ and dau...

Do the Unemployed Become Successful Entrepreneurs? A Comparison between the Unemployed, Inactive and Wage-Earners In many countries unemployed people are helped to become self-employed. Selfemployment, however, does not necessarily lead to success. Many leave self-employment after a short period and the economic outcome varies greatly. It is important to learn more about the economic outcome fo...

There are few studies on occupational choices in Germany, and the second generation occupational choice and mobility is even less investigated. Such research is important because occupations determine success in the labor market. In a country like Germany occupations also reflect a general socio-economic standing. This paper looks at the patterns of employment in Germany, analyzes how individua...

The premise of this paper is twofold. First, people’s aspirations for their future wellbeing (or that of their children) affect their incentives to invest. Second, the experiences of others help shape one’s aspirations. This paper marries a model of aspirations-based choice with a simple theory of aspirations formation to study the relationship between aspirations and the distribution of income...

Economic conditions at the time of labour market entry can induce wage diff erentials between workers entering the labour market at diff erent points in time. While the existence and persistence of these entry wage diff erentials are well documented, little is known about their interaction with employees’ mobility behaviour. This paper contributes to this research area by analyzing the interact...

This paper contributes to the growing literature on modeling individual wage dynamics. I build and estimate an error component model of wage process jointly with a structural life-cycle model of job mobility in an economy with search friction and job-switching cost. Besides separating shocks by their persistence, I distinguish two sources of wage shocks: shocks at worker-firm level and shocks a...