Essay 1: If grandparents have an independent impact on their grandchildren's schooling, intergenerational correlations estimated using two generations will underestimate the true level of intergenerational persistence in education. Recent research has found such multi-generational effects, but there is still no consensus on whether these estimates are due to a direct impact of grandparents on their grandchildren, or if they arise because of measurement error or model misspecification. In this paper, I estimate the intergenerational transmission arising from direct interactions with grandparents by comparing families where the grandparent died before the birth of the grandchild with those where the grandparent lived to meet and spend time with the grandchild. I find that direct effects contribute most, if not all, of the transmission coefficient across three generations.

Essay 2: Sibling correlations in education and income have been extensively studied in the literature, and attempts to look inside the correlation have focused on family and neighborhood effects. In this paper I estimate sibling spillovers in education—that is, the effect of an older sibling's schooling on their younger sibling's schooling. To estimate causal effects, I use a compulsory school reform in Sweden in the 1950s to instrument for the older sibling's schooling. I am unable to detect statistically significant sibling spillovers, implying that any such spillovers must be relatively small.

Essay 3: (with Che-Yuan Liang) The implementation of a copyright protection reform in Sweden in April 2009 suddenly increased the risk of being caught and prosecuted for illegal file sharing. This paper uses the reform to investigate the effects of illegal file sharing on music and movie sales. We find that the reform decreased Internet traffic by 16 percent during the subsequent six months. It also increased music sales by 36 percent. Furthermore, it had no significant effects on movie sales. We conclude that pirated music is a strong substitute to legal music whereas the substitutability is less for movies.

Essay 4: (with Magnus Gustavsson) This paper shows that between 1975 and 2005, Sweden exhibited a pattern of job polarization with expansions of the highest and lowest paid jobs compared to middle-wage jobs. The most popular explanation for such a pattern is the hypothesis of "task-biased technological change", where technological progress reduces the demand for routine middle-wage jobs but increases the demand for non-routine jobs located at the tails of the job-wage distribution. Our estimates, however, do not endorse this explanation for the 1970s and 1980s. Stronger evidence for task biased technological change, albeit not conclusive, is found for the 1990s and 2000s. In particular, there is both a statistically and economically significant growth of non-routine jobs and a decline of routine jobs. No link between wage changes and routine tasks, as would be expected from task-biased technological change, can however be established.

I denna uppsats genomförs en empirisk analys av den svenska skivmarknaden och den nedgång i skivförsäljningen som skett under senare år. Fokus ligger på att undersöka om nedgången orsakats av illegal fildelning, eller om andra faktorer kan ligga bakom. Analysen sker genom en genomgång av relevanta aggregerade data för skivförsäljning, videoförsäljning, internetanvändande m.m. En enkel ekonometrisk analys görs också, och sammantaget visar resultaten att den växande konkurrensen från DVD-film troligen är en viktig orsak till den minskade skivförsäljningen. Inga tydliga bevis för att fildelningen haft en signifikant påverkan hittas. Brist på detaljdata gör dock att alla slutsatser måste tolkas försiktigt.

Using a new identification strategy, we jointly estimate the growth in occupationalwage premia as well as time-varying occupation-specific life-cycle profiles for Swedishworkers 1996–2013. We document a substantial increase in between-occupation wageinequality due to differential growth in premia. The association of wage premiumgrowth and employment growth is positive, suggesting that premium growth ispredominantly driven by demand side factors. We also find that wage growth dueto occupation-specific skill acquisition was more dispersed in the early years of thesample period. Our results are robust to allowing for occupation-level changes inreturns to cognitive and psycho-social skills.

This paper shows that between 1975 and 2005, Sweden exhibited a pattern of job polarization with expansions of the highest and lowest paid jobs compared to middle-wage jobs. The most popular explanation for such a pattern is the hypothesis of ‘task-biased technological change’, where technological progress reduces the demand for routine middle-wage jobs but increases the demand for non-routine jobs located at the tails of the job-wage distribution. Our estimates, however, do not support this explanation for the 1970s and 1980s. Stronger evidence for task biased technological change, albeit not conclusive, is found for the 1990s and 2000s. In particular, there is both a statistically and economically significant growth of non-routine jobs and a decline of routine jobs. Results for wages are, however, mixed; while task-biased technological change cannot explain changes in between-occupation wage differentials, it does have considerable explanatory power for changes in within-occupation wage differentials.

This paper investigates the connection between the Swedish wage profile of net job creation and Autor, Levy, and Murnane’s (2003) proposed substitutability between routine tasks and technology. We first show that between 1975 and 2005, Sweden exhibited a pattern of job polarization with expansions of the highest and lowest paid jobs compared to middle-wage jobs. We then use cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses of job-specific employment to map out the importance of routine versus nonroutine tasks for these changes. Results are consistent with substitutability between routine tasks and technology as an important explanation for the observed job polarization during the 1990s and 2000s, but not during the 1970s and 1980s. In particular, the overrepresentation of routine tasks in middle-wage jobs can potentially explain 44 percent of the growth of low-wage jobs relative to middle-wage jobs after 1990 but largely lacks explanatory power in earlier years.

How useful is work experience from the gig economy for labor market entrants searching for traditional wage jobs? We conducted a correspondence study in Sweden, comparing callback rates for recent high school graduates with (i) gig-experience, (ii) traditional experience, and (iii) unemployment history. We also study heterogeneous responses with respect to perceived foreign background. Our findings suggest that gig-experience is more valuable than unemployment, but less useful than traditional experience for majority applicants. Strikingly however, no form of labor market experience increases the callback rate for minority workers.

The implementation of a copyright protection reform in Sweden in April 2009 suddenly increased the risk of being caught and punished for illegal file sharing. This paper investigates the impact of the reform on illegal file sharing and music sales using a difference-in-differences approach with Norway and Finland as control groups. We find that the reform decreased Internet traffic by 16% and increased music sales by 36% during the first six months. Pirated music therefore seems to be a strong substitute to legal music. However, the reform effects disappeared almost completely after six months, likely because of the weak enforcement of the law.

This paper investigates the effects of illegal file sharing (piracy) on music and movie sales. The Swedish implementation of the European Union directive IPRED on April 1, 2009 suddenly increased the risk of being caught and prosecuted for file sharing. We investigate the subsequent drop in piracy as approximated by the drop in Swedish Internet traffic and the effects on music and movie sales in Sweden. We find that the reform decreased Internet traffic by 18 percent during the subsequent six months. It also increased sales of physical music by 27 percent and digital music by 48 percent. Furthermore, it had no significant effects on the sales of theater tickets or DVD movies. The results indicate that pirated music is a strong substitute for legal music whereas the substitutability is less for movies.

We estimate long-run intergenerational persistence in human capital using information on outcomes for the extended family: the dynasty. A dataset including the entire Swedish population, linking four generations, allows us to identify parents' siblings and cousins, their spouses, and spouses' siblings. Using various human capital measures, we show that traditional parent-child estimates underestimate long-run intergenerational persistence by at least one-third. By adding outcomes for more distant ancestors, we show that almost all of the persistence is captured by the parental generation. Data on adoptees show that at least one-third of -long-term persistence is attributed to environmental factors.

This study estimates intergenerational wealth correlations across up to four generations and examines the degree to which the wealth association between parents and children can be explained by inheritances. Using a Swedish data set with newly hand-collected data on wealth and bequests, we find parent-child rank correlations of 0.3-0.4 and grandparent-grandchild rank correlations of 0.1-0.2. Bequests and gifts appear to be central in this process, accounting for at least half of the parent-child wealth correlation while earnings and education can account for only a quarter.

We use linked parent-child administrative data for five countries in North America and Europe, as well as detailed survey data for two more, to investigate methodological challenges in the estimation of absolute income mobility. We show that the commonly used "copula and marginals" approximation methods perform well across countries in our sample, and the greatest challenges to their accuracy stem not from assumptions about relative mobility rates over time but from the use of nonrepresentative marginal income distributions. We also provide a multicountry analysis of sensitivity to specification decisions related to age of income measurement, income concept, family structure, and price index. (JEL D31, G51, I31, J12, J31, J62)