A. Björklund - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by A. Björklund

Journal of Labor Economics, 2003

Using data from 1998, we show that the gender log wage gap in Sweden increases throughout the wag... more Using data from 1998, we show that the gender log wage gap in Sweden increases throughout the wage distribution and accelerates in the upper tail of the distribution, which we interpret as a glass ceiling effect. Using earlier data, we show that the same pattern held at the beginning of the 1990's but not in the prior two decades. Further, we do not find this pattern either for the log wage gap between immigrants and nonimmigrants in the Swedish labor market or for the gender gap in the U.S. labor market. Our findings suggest that a gender-specific mechanism in the Swedish labor market hinders women from reaching the top of the wage distribution. Using quantile regressions, we examine whether this pattern can be ascribed primarily to gender differences in labor market characteristics or to gender differences in rewards to those characteristics. We estimate pooled quantile regressions with gender dummies, as well as separate quantile regressions by gender, and we carry out a decomposition analysis in the spirit of the Oaxaca-Blinder technique. Even after extensive controls for gender differences in age, education (both level and field), sector, industry, and occupation, we find that the glass ceiling effect we see in the raw data persists to a considerable extent.

Review of Income and Wealth, 2002

This paper compares income inequality and income mobility in the Scandinavian countries and the U... more This paper compares income inequality and income mobility in the Scandinavian countries and the United States during 1980–90. The results suggest that inequality is greater in the United States than in the Scandinavian countries and that this inequality ranking of countries remains unchanged when the accounting period of income is extended from one to eleven years. The pattern of mobility turns out to be remarkably similar, in the sense that the proportionate reduction in inequality from extending the accounting period of income is much the same. But we do find evidence of greater dispersion of first differences of relative earnings and income in the United States. Relative income changes are associated with changes in labor market and marital status in all four countries, but the magnitude of such changes are largest in the United States.

Journal of Public Economics, 2012

This paper presents new evidence on intergenerational mobility in the top of the income and earni... more This paper presents new evidence on intergenerational mobility in the top of the income and earnings distribution. Using a large dataset of matched father-son pairs in Sweden, we find that intergenerational transmission is very strong in the top, more so for income than for earnings. In the extreme top (top 0.1 percent) income transmission is remarkable with an IG elasticity above 0.9. We also study potential transmission mechanisms and find that sons' IQ, non-cognitive skills and education are all unlikely channels in explaining this strong transmission. Within the top percentile, increases in fathers' income are, if anything, negatively associated with these variables. Wealth, on the other hand, has a significantly positive association. Our results suggest that Sweden, known for having relatively high intergenerational mobility in general, is a society where transmission remains strong in the very top of the distribution and that wealth is the most likely channel.

The Journal of Human Resources, 1985

In this paper the effects of unemployment on mental health are analysed. A simple model where bot... more In this paper the effects of unemployment on mental health are analysed. A simple model where both the occurrence of and duration of unemployment are allowed to affect mental health is specified. Panel data are used to control for "fixed effects," Le., omitted variables that are constant over time. The main finding is that those who are unemployed seem to have worse mental health than others whereas no effects were found af ter having controlled for fixed effects.

This paper examines whether parental marriage confers educational advantages to children relative... more This paper examines whether parental marriage confers educational advantages to children relative to cohabitation. We exploit a dramatic marriage boom in Sweden in late 1989 created by a reform of the Widow's Pension System that raised the attractiveness of marriage compared to cohabitation to identify the effect of marriage. Sweden's rich administrative data sources enable us to identify the children who were affected by parental marriage due to this marriage boom. Our analysis addresses the policy relevant question whether marginal marriages created by a policy initiative have an impact on children. Using grade point average at age 16 as the outcome variable, we first confirm the expected pattern that children with married parents do better than children with cohabiting parents. However, once we control for observable family background, or use instrumental-variables estimation to compare the outcomes for those children whose parents married due to the reform with those children whose parents remained unmarried, the differences disappeared. A supplementary sibling difference analysis also supports the conclusion that the differentials among children of married and cohabiting parents reflect selection rather than causation.

This paper focuses on children who live with both biological parents and analyzes whether parenta... more This paper focuses on children who live with both biological parents and analyzes whether parental marriage confers any educational advantages to children relative to cohabitation. Cohabitation has been increasing in most countries and is more common in Sweden than anywhere else in the industrialized world. We use the marriage boom in the last two months of 1989 created by the reform of the widow's pension system in Sweden to identify the causal effect of a marginal increase in the exposure to married parents on children's educational outcomes as measured by grade point averages (GPA) at age 16. We find no positive effect of marriage on children's GPAs for parents who married in the end of 1989 but we do find that children whose parents were married before they were born had higher GPAs than all other children. We attribute these findings to selection into marriage. JEL-codes: I21, J12 Acknowledgments: This paper was prepared for the 2005 NBER Summer Institute Children's Workshop. We thank Suzanne Bianchi and seminar participants at IUPUI and Uppsala University for helpful comments. Ginther acknowledges financial support from the National Science Foundation. Any errors are our own responsibility.

Working Paper Series, 2011

This study uses an extraordinary Swedish data set to explore the sources of the intergenerational... more 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 daughters' socioeconomic outcomes and those of their biological and rearing parents. Our analysis focuses on children raised in six different family circumstances: raised by both biological parents, raised by the biological mother without a stepfather, raised by the biological mother with a stepfather, raised by the biological father without a stepmother, raised by the biological father with a stepmother, and raised by two adoptive parents. Relative to the existing literature, the most remarkable feature of our data set is that it contains information on the biological parents even when they are not the rearing parents. We specify a simple additive model of pre-birth (including genetic) and post-birth influences and examine the model's ability to provide a unified account of the intergenerational associations in all six family types. Our results suggest substantial roles for both pre-birth and post-birth factors.

This paper examines whether parental marriage confers educational advantages to children relative... more This paper examines whether parental marriage confers educational advantages to children relative to cohabitation. We exploit a dramatic marriage boom in Sweden in late 1989 created by a reform of the Widow’s Pension System that raised the attractiveness of marriage compared to cohabitation to identify the effect of marriage and the effect of selection bias on marriage estimates. Sweden’s rich

... Kenneth Nelson Swedish Institute for Social Research Stockholm University S-106 91 Stockholm ... more ... Kenneth Nelson Swedish Institute for Social Research Stockholm University S-106 91 Stockholm Phone +46 8 6747128 Fax +46 8 154670 kenneth.nelson@sofi.su.se ... in lower income brackets. Most importantly, however, simulations of the Danish and Bel-...

The availability of scanner data from large-scale retailers makes the construction of a continuou... more The availability of scanner data from large-scale retailers makes the construction of a continuously updated system of price indexes over space and time for an important share of household consumption expenditures possible. However, building a coherent (transitive) system of price indexes across space and time involves issues that are irrelevant for bilateral price indexes or multilateral price indexes only over space. Some of these issues were discussed by Hill , but in my opinion the most important has been ignored. Indeed, it is very likely that the same commodity is differently priced across space, but in the long run the movements of its prices will be similar (stable) in space. So it is quite natural to ask price indexes for pairs of space situations not to diverge over time if the prices of each single commodity in the basket remain approximatively pairwise proportional in the two sites. In this work, we give a definition of the test of stability preservation, starting from the stochastic properties that panels of price time series seem to obey to. Then, many different approaches to the construction of the system of indexes are analysed in order to identify those that pass the test. The selected systems are applied both to simulated and to real-world data collected in four supermarkets located in the city of Milan for a time span of 24 months.

... Karin.HederosEriksson@hhs.se Stockholm School of Economics, Stockholm, Sweden. Page 2. 2 1. I... more ... Karin.HederosEriksson@hhs.se Stockholm School of Economics, Stockholm, Sweden. Page 2. 2 1. Introduction ... had been legal, this study indirectly sheds light on the plausibility of the hypothesis of Donohue & Levitt (2001) that legalized abortion reduces crime. ...

Journal of Labor Economics, 2003

Using data from 1998, we show that the gender log wage gap in Sweden increases throughout the wag... more Using data from 1998, we show that the gender log wage gap in Sweden increases throughout the wage distribution and accelerates in the upper tail of the distribution, which we interpret as a glass ceiling effect. Using earlier data, we show that the same pattern held at the beginning of the 1990's but not in the prior two decades. Further, we do not find this pattern either for the log wage gap between immigrants and nonimmigrants in the Swedish labor market or for the gender gap in the U.S. labor market. Our findings suggest that a gender-specific mechanism in the Swedish labor market hinders women from reaching the top of the wage distribution. Using quantile regressions, we examine whether this pattern can be ascribed primarily to gender differences in labor market characteristics or to gender differences in rewards to those characteristics. We estimate pooled quantile regressions with gender dummies, as well as separate quantile regressions by gender, and we carry out a decomposition analysis in the spirit of the Oaxaca-Blinder technique. Even after extensive controls for gender differences in age, education (both level and field), sector, industry, and occupation, we find that the glass ceiling effect we see in the raw data persists to a considerable extent.

Review of Income and Wealth, 2002

This paper compares income inequality and income mobility in the Scandinavian countries and the U... more This paper compares income inequality and income mobility in the Scandinavian countries and the United States during 1980–90. The results suggest that inequality is greater in the United States than in the Scandinavian countries and that this inequality ranking of countries remains unchanged when the accounting period of income is extended from one to eleven years. The pattern of mobility turns out to be remarkably similar, in the sense that the proportionate reduction in inequality from extending the accounting period of income is much the same. But we do find evidence of greater dispersion of first differences of relative earnings and income in the United States. Relative income changes are associated with changes in labor market and marital status in all four countries, but the magnitude of such changes are largest in the United States.

Journal of Public Economics, 2012

This paper presents new evidence on intergenerational mobility in the top of the income and earni... more This paper presents new evidence on intergenerational mobility in the top of the income and earnings distribution. Using a large dataset of matched father-son pairs in Sweden, we find that intergenerational transmission is very strong in the top, more so for income than for earnings. In the extreme top (top 0.1 percent) income transmission is remarkable with an IG elasticity above 0.9. We also study potential transmission mechanisms and find that sons' IQ, non-cognitive skills and education are all unlikely channels in explaining this strong transmission. Within the top percentile, increases in fathers' income are, if anything, negatively associated with these variables. Wealth, on the other hand, has a significantly positive association. Our results suggest that Sweden, known for having relatively high intergenerational mobility in general, is a society where transmission remains strong in the very top of the distribution and that wealth is the most likely channel.

The Journal of Human Resources, 1985

In this paper the effects of unemployment on mental health are analysed. A simple model where bot... more In this paper the effects of unemployment on mental health are analysed. A simple model where both the occurrence of and duration of unemployment are allowed to affect mental health is specified. Panel data are used to control for "fixed effects," Le., omitted variables that are constant over time. The main finding is that those who are unemployed seem to have worse mental health than others whereas no effects were found af ter having controlled for fixed effects.

This paper examines whether parental marriage confers educational advantages to children relative... more This paper examines whether parental marriage confers educational advantages to children relative to cohabitation. We exploit a dramatic marriage boom in Sweden in late 1989 created by a reform of the Widow's Pension System that raised the attractiveness of marriage compared to cohabitation to identify the effect of marriage. Sweden's rich administrative data sources enable us to identify the children who were affected by parental marriage due to this marriage boom. Our analysis addresses the policy relevant question whether marginal marriages created by a policy initiative have an impact on children. Using grade point average at age 16 as the outcome variable, we first confirm the expected pattern that children with married parents do better than children with cohabiting parents. However, once we control for observable family background, or use instrumental-variables estimation to compare the outcomes for those children whose parents married due to the reform with those children whose parents remained unmarried, the differences disappeared. A supplementary sibling difference analysis also supports the conclusion that the differentials among children of married and cohabiting parents reflect selection rather than causation.

This paper focuses on children who live with both biological parents and analyzes whether parenta... more This paper focuses on children who live with both biological parents and analyzes whether parental marriage confers any educational advantages to children relative to cohabitation. Cohabitation has been increasing in most countries and is more common in Sweden than anywhere else in the industrialized world. We use the marriage boom in the last two months of 1989 created by the reform of the widow's pension system in Sweden to identify the causal effect of a marginal increase in the exposure to married parents on children's educational outcomes as measured by grade point averages (GPA) at age 16. We find no positive effect of marriage on children's GPAs for parents who married in the end of 1989 but we do find that children whose parents were married before they were born had higher GPAs than all other children. We attribute these findings to selection into marriage. JEL-codes: I21, J12 Acknowledgments: This paper was prepared for the 2005 NBER Summer Institute Children's Workshop. We thank Suzanne Bianchi and seminar participants at IUPUI and Uppsala University for helpful comments. Ginther acknowledges financial support from the National Science Foundation. Any errors are our own responsibility.

Working Paper Series, 2011

This study uses an extraordinary Swedish data set to explore the sources of the intergenerational... more 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 daughters' socioeconomic outcomes and those of their biological and rearing parents. Our analysis focuses on children raised in six different family circumstances: raised by both biological parents, raised by the biological mother without a stepfather, raised by the biological mother with a stepfather, raised by the biological father without a stepmother, raised by the biological father with a stepmother, and raised by two adoptive parents. Relative to the existing literature, the most remarkable feature of our data set is that it contains information on the biological parents even when they are not the rearing parents. We specify a simple additive model of pre-birth (including genetic) and post-birth influences and examine the model's ability to provide a unified account of the intergenerational associations in all six family types. Our results suggest substantial roles for both pre-birth and post-birth factors.

This paper examines whether parental marriage confers educational advantages to children relative... more This paper examines whether parental marriage confers educational advantages to children relative to cohabitation. We exploit a dramatic marriage boom in Sweden in late 1989 created by a reform of the Widow’s Pension System that raised the attractiveness of marriage compared to cohabitation to identify the effect of marriage and the effect of selection bias on marriage estimates. Sweden’s rich

... Kenneth Nelson Swedish Institute for Social Research Stockholm University S-106 91 Stockholm ... more ... Kenneth Nelson Swedish Institute for Social Research Stockholm University S-106 91 Stockholm Phone +46 8 6747128 Fax +46 8 154670 kenneth.nelson@sofi.su.se ... in lower income brackets. Most importantly, however, simulations of the Danish and Bel-...

The availability of scanner data from large-scale retailers makes the construction of a continuou... more The availability of scanner data from large-scale retailers makes the construction of a continuously updated system of price indexes over space and time for an important share of household consumption expenditures possible. However, building a coherent (transitive) system of price indexes across space and time involves issues that are irrelevant for bilateral price indexes or multilateral price indexes only over space. Some of these issues were discussed by Hill , but in my opinion the most important has been ignored. Indeed, it is very likely that the same commodity is differently priced across space, but in the long run the movements of its prices will be similar (stable) in space. So it is quite natural to ask price indexes for pairs of space situations not to diverge over time if the prices of each single commodity in the basket remain approximatively pairwise proportional in the two sites. In this work, we give a definition of the test of stability preservation, starting from the stochastic properties that panels of price time series seem to obey to. Then, many different approaches to the construction of the system of indexes are analysed in order to identify those that pass the test. The selected systems are applied both to simulated and to real-world data collected in four supermarkets located in the city of Milan for a time span of 24 months.

... Karin.HederosEriksson@hhs.se Stockholm School of Economics, Stockholm, Sweden. Page 2. 2 1. I... more ... Karin.HederosEriksson@hhs.se Stockholm School of Economics, Stockholm, Sweden. Page 2. 2 1. Introduction ... had been legal, this study indirectly sheds light on the plausibility of the hypothesis of Donohue & Levitt (2001) that legalized abortion reduces crime. ...