This paper examines the effect of foreign acquisition on wages and employment of different skill groups using panel data on Finnish establishments for 1988–2001. Exploiting the availability of a rich set of preacquisition controls, we use various regression and propensity-score matching methods. The results indicate that foreign acquisition has a positive effect on wages. The magnitude of this effect increases with the level of schooling of the workers. The wage increase is not immediate, but occurs within one to three years from the acquisition. The results also indicate that the acquisition decreases the share of highly educated workers in the plant's employment.

This paper analyzes the effects of job displacement on fertility using Finnish longitudinal register data. We focus on couples where one spouse has lost a job due to a plant closure and follow them for several years before and following the job loss. The results show that female job loss decreases fertility. For every 100 displaced females, there are three fewer children born. Male job loss has no impact on fertility despite resulting in a stronger decrease in family income than female job loss. This indicates that the income effect is not the mechanism through which job displacement influences fertility.

We study the migration behavior of displaced workers and find that job displacement increases regional mobility. We find, however, that noneconomic factors, such as family ties, are very important for the migration decision and that there is strong heterogeneity in outcomes. We find large income losses for workers who move to regions where they have family or to rural areas, while, for example, rural to urban movers realize a significant long-term earnings increase. We also find that life events related to fertility, divorce, and new relationships correlate with mobility after job loss and may partly explain the large income losses.

Using administrative labor market data matched to mortality statistics and patient records, we document that negative labor market shocks produce sizable health spillovers in couples. For every 100,000 displaced men, there are 1,100 additional deaths. Of those, 60% accrue to the displaced worker, but 40% are due to excess spousal mortality. We find a stunning gender asymmetry: while male job displacement generates persistent negative health effects, no such dire consequences are observed after a woman’s job loss. We explore several explanations for these patterns: risk sharing through spousal labor supply; earnings losses and public insurance; widowhood; regional mobility and gender roles in the family.

Domestic abuse encompasses a range of damaging behaviors beyond physical violence, including economic and emotional abuse. We analyze the impact of cohabiting with an abusive partner on victims’ economic outcomes. In so doing, we highlight the systematic role of economic suppression in such relationships. Using Finnish administrative data and a matched-control event-study design, along with a within-individual comparison of outcomes across relationships, we document three new facts. First, women who begin relationships with (eventually) physically abusive men suffer large and significant earnings and employment falls immediately upon cohabiting with the abusive partner. Second, the decline in economic outcomes is non-monotonic in women’s pre-cohabitation outside options. Third, men who are violent against women in any capacity impose economic costs on all their female partners, even those who do not report physical violence. To rationalize these findings, we develop a new dynamic model of abusive relationships where women do not perfectly observe their partner’s type, and abusive men have an incentive to use economic suppression to sabotage women’s outside options and their ability to later exit the relationship.

We link every police report in Finland to administrative data to identify violence between colleagues and the economic consequences for victims, perpetrators, and firms. This new approach to observe when one colleague attacks another overcomes previous data constraints limiting evidence on this phenomenon to self-reported surveys that do not identify perpetrators. We document large, persistent labor market effects of between-colleague violence on victims and perpetrators. Male perpetrators experience substantially weaker consequences after attacking female colleagues. Perpetrators’ relative economic power in male-female violence partly explains this asymmetry. Turning to broader implications for firm recruitment and retention, we find that male-female violence causes a decline in the proportion of women at the firm, both because fewer new women are hired and current female employees leave. Management plays a key role in mediating the effects on the wider workforce. Only male-managed firms lose women. Female-managed firms exhibit a key difference relative to male-managed firms: male perpetrators are less likely to remain employed after attacking their female colleagues.