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| 2. |
- Baltander, Richard, 1969-
(författare)
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Education, Labour Market and Incomes for the Deaf/Hearing Impaired and the Blind/Visually Impaired
- 2009
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Essay I: Return to Education for the Deaf/Hearing Impaired and the Blind/Visually Impaired, 1991-2000 Mincer-equations are estimated for the deaf/hearing impaired and the blind/visually impaired. The results show that the estimates of the coefficient for the education variable are lower than for a comparison group, and that for several years it is not statistically significant that education for the blind/visually impaired has a positive effect on labour income. Essay II: Labour Income Distribution for the Deaf/Hearing Impaired and the Blind/Visually Impaired in Sweden, 1991-2000 Incomes or the deaf/hearing impaired and the blind/visually impaired are studied. They are compared with the income distribution for a comparison group. The results show that the income distribution is most unequal for the blind/visually impaired and that the average and median incomes are clearly lowest for this group. One explanation is a high share of zero earners. Essay III: Wages and Wage Distributions for the Deaf/Hearing Impaired and the Blind/Visually Impaired with and without Wage Subsidy Mincer-equations with a wage subsidy dummy are estimated and wage distributions are studied for the deaf/hearing impaired and the blind/visually impaired. The coefficient for the wage subsidy dummy is discussed. From the wage distributions for full-time employed people we see that employed people with a wage subsidy have a more compact wage distribution compared to employed people without a wage subsidy. Essay IV: Employment for the Deaf/Hearing Impaired and the Blind/Visually Impaired during the 1990s Employment rates for the deaf/hearing impaired and the blind/visually impaired are compared with a group that represents the Swedish population. The results show that the pattern and level of the employment rate are similar for the deaf/hearing impaired and the comparison group. The employment rate is clearly lower for the blind/visually impaired people, however.
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| 3. |
- Bos, Marieke, 1974-
(författare)
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Essays on Household Finance
- 2010
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The thesis consists of three self-contained essays on household finance. “Pawn Credit and the Importance of Financial Exclusion” explores the importance of access to regular credit to the demand for pawn credit. I find that the rejection of one's loan application by a regular bank increases the probability that one will take pawn credit, on average, by 9 percent, relative to individuals whose loan application has been granted. However, of all pawn credit borrowers, 73 percent do not even try to get regular bank credit first. For these borrowers, I find that 93 percent are implicitly excluded from regular bank credit at the time they decide to take pawn credit. “Should Credit Remark Be Forgotten? Evidence from a Legally Mandated Removal” (with Leonard Nakamura) analyzes what happens when Swedish law mandates the removal of credit remarks from credit reports after three years. We find that removal induces an abrupt improvement in individuals' credit scores, an improvement that is not reversed in the long run. Further, the excess loan applications caused by the boost in creditworthiness translate into significant access to new credit. We find evidence that only a minority of the individuals who received a credit remark may be inherently high risk which suggests that credit remark removal is welfare enhancing. “Accept or Reject: Do Immigrants Have Less Access to Bank Credit? Evidence from Swedish Pawnshop Customers” asks if immigrants have less access to mainstream credit than their Swedish born counterparts. I find that immigrants are six percent less likely to be accepted when applying for mainstream credit, relative to Swedish born. This holds in particular for immigrants of African descent, who are 15 percent less likely. This effect disappears for second-generation immigrants with African parents. Immigrant pawnshop borrowers that do not apply for mainstream credit before they take pawn credit are found to make well-informed decisions.
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| 4. |
- Gränsmark, Patrik, 1972-
(författare)
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Essays on economic behavior, gender and strategic learning
- 2010
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This doctoral thesis consists of four papers. Strategic behavior across gender: A comparison of female and male expert chess players analyzes gender differences in risk behavior in chess. We use a panel data set with 1.4 million games. Most notably, the data contains an objective measure of individual playing skill. We find that women are more risk averse and that men choose riskier strategies when playing against female opponents even though this reduces their winning probability. Gender differences in time preference and inconsistency among expert chess players presents findings on gender differences in time preference and inconsistency in chess. Impatience is estimated by measuring preferences for game durations while inconsistency by exploiting the 40th move time control. The results reveal that men are more impatient while women are more time inconsistent. Moreover, the difference in impatience increases with expertise while the difference in inconsistency decreases. Beauty queens and battling knights: Risk taking and attractiveness in chess explores the relationship between attractiveness and risk taking in chess. We examine whether people use riskier strategies when playing with attractive opponents and whether this affects performance. Our results suggest that male, but not female, chess players choose significantly riskier strategies when playing against an attractive female opponent, although this does not improve their performance. Strategic Learning in Repeated Chess Games, examines if chess players in repeated games with the same opponent, learn about the opponent’s type and adapt future strategies accordingly. It also shows how matching background characteristics affect the choice of strategy. The findings show that chess players learn about the opponent’s type. Players with similar background characteristics coordinate better than players of different gender or nationality but this difference decreases as the players update their beliefs.
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| 5. |
- Lachowska, Marta, 1981-
(författare)
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Essays in Labor Economics and Consumer Behavior
- 2010
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis consists of three essays on labor economics and consumption behavior. “Consumption and Information: A Study of Consumer Behavior using Daily Data” studies the joint dynamics of information and consumption using data on a daily frequency. I find that spending reacts sharply to informational shocks, but in contrast to previous research findings, this reaction fades in a very short period of time. Additionally, my data allow me to move beyond representative agent models in studying the response of individuals facing different levels of income stability. Unlike papers using aggregate data, I am able to contrast the reactions of different types of consumers. I find that individuals who face less secure income streams cut back more than those with a secure income. I argue that this behavior of consumption cannot be adequately explained using canonical consumption theories, such as the permanent income hypothesis model or the buffer stock model. “The Importance of Outside Options for Wage Formation: Survey Evidence” considers a central prediction of the matching model of Diamond-Mortensen-Pissarides. This model suggests that outside options of the worker and the firm matter for wage formation. This prediction has recently been questioned on theoretical grounds. In this essay, I address this issue empirically by using data from unique survey questions to assess the importance of outside options for hourly wages. My findings imply that the disutility of being unmatched matters for wage formation. Together with other research documenting the prevalence of wage bargaining on the labor market, my results imply good news for the Nash bargaining solution of the Diamond-Mortensen-Pissarides model. “Give Me a Break. A Longitudinal Analysis of On-the-Job Leisure” addresses predictions of models of wage formation. Models of efficiency wages predict that pay and monitoring are substitutes in motivating workers to exert effort. If worker autonomy is the reverse of monitoring, a positive relationship between autonomy and wages is implied. If, on the other hand, workers obtain utility from autonomy in a perfectly competitive market, the market will reduce any advantages of holding autonomous jobs. Thus, there will be a negative correlation between autonomy and wages. In this essay, I analyze a common, but little-studied feature of worker autonomy: how much leisure employees can take at work. I find a positive relationship between on-the-job leisure and pay in the 1960s and 1970s, but a negative correlation since the 1980s. This change could be due to a labor market structure described by the neoclassical model or lower monitoring costs.
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| 6. |
- Liu, Qian
(författare)
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Essays on Labor Economics: Education, Employment, and Gender
- 2009
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Essay I, co-authored with Bertil Holmlund and Oskar Nordström Skans, offers evidence on how delayed transitions to higher education (“gap years”) affect subsequent earnings and lifetime earnings. We exploit rich Swedish register data and find that postponement of higher education is associated with a persistent and non-trivial earnings penalty. The main source of the earnings penalty associated with gap years is that the returns to post-university work experience are higher than the returns to gap years. Postponement of university education reduces time for post-university investment in skills and therefore entails lower earnings subsequent to university graduation. Essay II uses Swedish data to compute rates of returns to education that incorporate mechanisms operating through the marriage market. I define marriage income as the transfers one obtains from the spouse and the overall income as the sum of work income and marriage income. I find that the marriage market can work as a cushion to reduce the overall earnings gap among people in different education categories. Although women with graduate degrees earn on average more than twice as much in annual work income than women with less than two years of university, their marriage incomes are less than half of marriage incomes in the latter group. Essay III uses micro data to document and analyze patterns and trends in labor force participation and employment in urban China during the past couple of decades. Estimations of logit models show that age, education, communist-party membership and marital status are significantly associated with participation in the labor force and employment opportunities. Being a communist party member in 2002 is associated with 3.5 percentage points higher employment rate for men and 6 points higher employment rates for women. An extension of the Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition is used to analyze gender differences in participation and employment. Essay IV, co-authored with Oskar Nordström Skans, examines how parental leave policies influence children’s human capital accumulation. Using a three-month parental leave extension that covered all Swedish children born from August 1988, we evaluate children’s test scores and grades at the age of 16. We find that the duration of paid parental leave benefits have no impact on average scholastic performance, although heterogeneity analysis discovers positive effects for children to well-educated mothers. We find no effects on child health, mothers’ health and subsequent earnings or parents’ fertility and divorce rates.
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| 7. |
- Gillberg, Gunnar, 1958, et al.
(författare)
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Digitalisering, lärande och utbildning
- 2018
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Ingår i: Arbetsmarknad & Arbetsliv. - 1400-9692 .- 2002-343X. ; 24:3-4
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Tidskriftsartikel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)
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| 8. |
- Andersson, Lina, 1979-
(författare)
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Essays on immigrant self-employment and labour supply
- 2007
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This licentiate’s thesis consists of two essays on immigrant self-employment and labour supply.The first essay (co-author Mats Hammarstedt), Intergenerational transmissions in immigrant self-employment: Evidence from three generations, reviews intergenerational transmissions in immigrant self-employment over three generations. More precisely, we study whether self-employment is transferred both from grandfather to grandson and from father to son, as well as if there are any differences between immigrant groups and differences between immigrants and natives. In addition, we investigate the importance of the intergenerational transfer of general and specific human capital for choice of business line. The results show that having a self-employed father and self-employed grandfather have a strong positive effect on self-employment propensities for male third-generation immigrants. On the other hand, natives were found to transfer self-employment from father to son, but not from grandfather to grandson. The results also indicate that immigrants inherit self-employment abilities from their self-employed fathers increasing the self-employment propensity, but not necessarily in the same business line. In contrast, native self-employed fathers transfer human capital to their sons making them more prone to become self-employed in the same business line as the father is in.The second essay, Female immigrant labour supply: The effect of an in-work benefit, focuses on immigrant labour supply, and evaluates the effect of a recently introduced in-work benefit, the so called job deduction, on the labour supply of single immigrant women. In this study, we address the following questions: What is the effect of the in-work benefit on the labour supply of single immigrant women? Does the effect of the in-work benefit on working hours differ between immigrant groups? The results show that, on average, there is no major effect of the in-work benefit on the labour supply of single immigrant women. However, households with the lowest incomes increase their working hours quite strongly. Furthermore, on average, there appears to be no difference in the effect of the in-work benefit between immigrant groups. In the low-income households, though, immigrants from non-European countries and from Southern and Eastern European countries, increase their labour supply relatively more than immigrants from Nordic countries and Western Europe. Finally, the relatively large increase in working hours for single immigrant women with the lowest incomes appears, above all, to be a result of increased participation in the labour market. However, part of the effect is related to an increase in the number of working hours of already employed women.
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| 9. |
- Andersson, Pernilla, 1977-
(författare)
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Four Essays on Self-Employment
- 2006
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Wage-Earners who Become Self-Employed: The Impact of Income and wages Does the relation between actual and expected income affect the decision to become self-employed? Wage-earners who receive an actual income that is different from the expected, both lower and higher, are more likely to become self-employed than wage-earners who receive an actual income close to the expected. Self-employed individuals who received a higher income than expected are more successful than other self-employed. Happiness and Health: Well-Being among the Self-EmployedIs well-being greater among the self-employed than among wage-earners? Indicators of well-being are: job satisfaction, life satisfaction, whether the job is stressful, whether the job is mentally straining, mental health problems, and poor general health. Conditional fixed effects logit models are estimated to control for selection. Self-employment increases both job and life satisfaction and it decreases the probability of finding the job mentally straining. Self-Employed Immigrants in Sweden: Are They as Successful as Natives?Do self-employed immigrants have lower incomes than self-employed natives? Income regressions are estimated using both OLS and quantile regressions. Immigrants receive significantly lower incomes than natives when controlling for individual characteristics and industry. The income differential is larger for non-Western immigrants than for Western immigrants. Quantile regressions show that the native-immigrant income gap is smaller at the top than at the bottom of the income distribution.Determinants of Exits from Self-EmploymentWhich groups are most likely to exit self-employment? Are there differences between groups regarding destination after self-employment? Young entrepreneurs, highly educated and self-employed who are also wage-earners are more likely to exit to paid employment. Women and non-Western immigrants are more likely to exit self-employment and become unemployed.
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| 10. |
- Boguslaw, Julia, 1985-
(författare)
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When the Kids Are Not Alright : Essays on Childhood Disadvantage and Its Consequences
- 2017
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis consists of three self-contained essays on childhood disadvantage and its consequences in Sweden.A Longitudinal Look at Child Poverty Using Both Monetary and Non-monetary Approaches. In this paper, we broaden the analysis of child poverty by using both monetary and non-monetary measures of poverty and by comparing these over time. We use a composite of questionnaire answers from children regarding possession of socially perceived necessities and participation in social activities to develop two non-monetary child-centric concepts of disadvantage: material deprivation and social exclusion. The empirical analysis is based on two cross-sections and a panel of children in the Swedish Level-of-Living Survey matched with parental survey data and administrative income records. Consistent with previous findings, we find that relative income poverty among children increases significantly between the year 2000 and 2010. The fraction of children that is disadvantaged in two dimensions, monetary and non-monetary, is relatively small (0.9–7.0 percent) but increases significantly during the period of study. The modest size of the overlap suggests that our measures capture different dimensions of disadvantage, thereby pointing to the importance of alternative poverty indicators. We also find that income status in childhood is the best predictor of socio-economic outcomes in young adulthood.The Aspirations-attainment Paradox of Immigrant Children: A Social Networks Approach. Using two independent and nationally representative samples of Swedish children, I compare the university aspirations and expectations between children of immigrants and children of natives. In line with existing findings, I find that children with foreign-born parents have significantly higher aspirations and expectations than their native-majority peers with and without conditioning on school performance, academic potential and friendship networks. I do not find any evidence of a significant immigrant-non-immigrant aspirations-expectations gap; immigrant children's aspirations and expectations are not less aligned than those of their native-majority peers. This result suggests that immigrant-native disparities in school outcomes are not driven by an aspirations-expectations gap. Finally, the results reveal significant gender differences. Native-majority girls with academic potential are, for example, more likely to express an aspirations-expectations gap. Moreover, having only female friends makes one less likely to belong to the aforementioned category.The Key Player in Disruptive Behavior: Whom Should We Target to Improve the Classroom Learning Environment? In this paper, I address the question: Who is the individual that exerts the greatest negative influence on the classroom learning environment? To answer this question, I invoke the key player model from network economics and use self-reported friendship data in order to solve the methodological problems associated with identifying and estimating peer effects. I overcome the issue of endogenous group formation by using the control function approach where I simultaneously estimate network formation and outcomes. The results show that the typical key player scores well on language and cognitive ability tests and is not more likely to be a boy than a girl. I also find evidence that removing the key player has a significantly larger effect on aggregate disruptiveness in a network than removing the most disruptive individual, implying that policy aimed at the most active individual could be inadequate.
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