I use panel data to examine whether long‐term changes in industry wages are positively related to long‐term changes in industry employment. Previous research using repeated cross‐sectional data found no systematic relationship between these variables. Using standard fixed effects models to deal with individual heterogeneity, I find a robust positive relationship between changes in composition‐constant industry wages and industry employment. This suggests that growing industries attract less skilled individuals in a manner that biases down the estimated relationship between industry employment and wages in repeated cross‐sectional data. The results imply that supply curves facing industries are elastic but upward sloping.

We investigate whether acquiring more primary education has long-term effects on risk-taking behavior in financial markets. Using exogenous variation in education from a compulsory schooling change combined with wealth data for the Swedish population, we estimate the effect of education on stock market participation and on the share of financial wealth invested in stocks, conditional on participation. For men, an extra year of education increases market participation by two percentage points and the share of financial wealth allocated to stocks by 10%. We find suggestive evidence that greater financial wealth is a potential channel through which education increases participation, consistent with the existence of fixed costs. Lower risk aversion is a potential channel through which education increases the stock share. The reform has less effect on female schooling attainment and there is no evidence that this additional education affects women’s asset allocation. There is no evidence of spillovers to children.

Teenage peers are perceived as being important, but there is little conclusive evidence demonstrating this. This paper uses data on the population of Norway and idiosyncratic variation in cohort composition within schools to examine the role of peer composition in ninth grade on longer-run outcomes such as IQ scores, teenage childbearing, education, and labor market outcomes. We find that outcomes are influenced by the proportion of females in the grade, and these effects differ by gender. Average age and average mother’s education of peers have little impact on teenagers but average father’s earnings of peers matters for boys.

Wealth is highly correlated between parents and their children; however, little is known about the extent to which these relationships are genetic or determined by environmental factors. We use administrative data on the net wealth of a large sample of Swedish adoptees merged with similar information for their biological and adoptive parents. Comparing the relationship between the wealth of adopted and biological parents and that of the adopted child, we find that, even prior to any inheritance, there is a substantial role for environment and a much smaller role for pre-birth factors and we find little evidence that nature/nurture interactions are important. When bequests are taken into account, the role of adoptive parental wealth becomes much stronger. Our findings suggest that wealth transmission is not primarily because children from wealthier families are inherently more talented or more able but that, even in relatively egalitarian Sweden, wealth begets wealth. We further build on the existing literature by providing a more comprehensive view of the role of nature and nurture on intergenerational mobility, looking at a wide range of different outcomes using a common sample and method. We find that environmental influences are relatively more important for wealth-related variables such as savings and investment decisions than for human capital. We conclude by studying consumption as an overall measure of welfare and find that, like wealth, it is more determined by environment than by biology.

Given the wide use of child care subsidies across countries, it is surprising how little we know about the effect of these subsidies on children's longer-run outcomes. Using a sharp discontinuity in the price of child care in Norway, we are able to isolate the effects of child care subsidies on both parental and student outcomes. We find very small and statistically insignificant effects of child care subsidies on child care utilization and parental labor force participation. Despite this, we find significant positive effect of the subsidies on children's academic performance in junior high school, suggesting that the positive shock to disposable income provided by the subsidies may be helping to improve children's scholastic aptitude.

We examine the effect of radiation exposure in utero, resulting from nuclear weapon testing in the 1950s and early 1960s, on long-run outcomes of Norwegian children. Exposure to low-dose radiation, specifically during months 3 and 4 in utero, leads to lower IQ scores for men and lower education attainment and earnings among men and women. Children of persons affected in utero also have lower cognitive scores, suggesting a persistent intergenerational effect of the shock to endowments. Given the lack of awareness about nuclear testing in Norway at this time, our estimates are likely unaffected by avoidance behavior or stress effects.