Discussion papers (SAM)
Recent Submissions
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The importance of co-determination for gender diversity in the boardroom
(DP SAM;12/2025, Working paper, 2025-05-15)This study examines the interplay of co-determination law and board gender quotas using novel board-director panel data for Norway. We present descriptive evidence suggesting that boards with employee representatives on ... -
Parental Leave from the Firm’s Perspective
(DP SAM;11/2025, Working paper, 2025-05-05)This study investigates the firm’s response to parental leave induced worker absence. Combining a 20-week maternal leave expansion in Norway and detailed matched employer-employee data between 1983 and 2013, we identify ... -
The Power to Discriminate
(DP SAM;10/2025, Working paper, 2025-04-07)This paper examines the relationship between labor market power and employer discrimination, providing new causal evidence on when and where discriminatory outcomes arise. We leverage job displacements from mass layoffs ... -
The Fatal Consequences of Brain Drain
(DP SAM;09/2025, Working paper, 2025-04-02)This paper examines the welfare consequences of reallocating high-skilled labor across borders. A labor demand shock in Norway—driven by a surge in oil prices—substantially increased physician wages and sharply raised the ... -
Fair Institutions
(DP SAM;08/2025, Working paper, 2025-04-01)The experimental literature on preferences for redistribution has established that individual perceptions of what earning distributions are fair depend greatly on context. In this paper, we study an important and novel ... -
How Tinted Are Your Glasses? Gender Views, Beliefs and Recommendations in Hiring
(DP SAM;07/2025, Working paper, 2025-03-31)We study the gendered impact of recommendations at different stages of the hiring process. First, using a large sample of reference letters from the academic job market for economists, we document that women receive fewer ... -
Fairness Across the World
(DP SAM;06/2025, Working paper, 2025-03-25)This paper provides global evidence on the nature of inequality acceptance, based on a large-scale experimental study with more than 65,000 individuals across 60 countries. We show that, across the world, the source of ... -
Firms’ Beliefs About Wage Setting
(DP SAM;05/2025, Working paper, 2025-03-06)This paper yields new insights into why similar workers are paid differently by surveying a representative sample of Danish firms and linking responses to administrative data. We find that a substantial minority of firms, ... -
Why Firms Lay Off Workers Instead of Cutting Wages: Evidence From Linked Survey-Administrative Data
(DP SAM;04/2025, Working paper, 2024-02)We use a novel large-scale survey of firms, implemented in Denmark in 2021 and linked to administrative data, to study why firms lay off workers instead of cutting wages. Our questions on layoffs, wage cuts, and the link ... -
Income Equality in The Nordic Countries: Myths, Facts, and Lessons
(DP SAM;03/2025, Working paper, 2025-02)Policymakers, public commentators, and researchers often cite the Nordic countries as examples of a social and economic model that successfully combines low income inequality with prosperity and growth. This article aims ... -
Public coverage of dental care: universal or targeted?
(DP SAM;02/2025, Working paper, 2025-01-27)This paper analyses the impact of public dental care coverage-universal versus targeted-on access, pricing, and public spending in a model with two competing dental practices and heterogeneous patient income groups. We ... -
Competition matters: uniform vs. indication-based pricing of pharmaceuticals
(DP SAM;01/2025, Working paper, 2025-01)Pharmaceutical expenditures are rising rapidly, driven in part by the innovation of highly effective but very expensive drug therapies that treat multiple diseases. While these drugs offer substantial health benefits, ... -
Claudia Goldin: Nobel Laureate 2023 and Her Impact on Understanding Women’s Position in the Labour Market
(DP SAM;19/2024, Working paper, 2024-12)On 9 October 2023, Claudia Goldin was announced as winner of the 2023 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. It can certainly be said that many had long awaited the recognition of her ... -
Health dynamics, life expectancy heterogeneity, and the racial gap in Social Security wealth
(DP SAM;18/2024, Working paper, 2024-10-28)Using biennial data from the Health and Retirement Study, we estimate agedependent health dynamics and survival probabilities at annual frequency conditional on race, sex, self-reported health and other covariates. The ... -
Fairness in a Society of Unequal Opportunities
(DP SAM;17/2024, Working paper, 2024-10-21)Modern societies are characterized by widespread disparities in opportunities, creating income inequality between people whose choices were shaped by different circumstances. This paper investigates how people handle income ... -
To hide or not to hide? How fear and futility affect the decision to report a mistake
(DP SAM;16/2024, Working paper, 2024-10)Even though reporting mistakes could substantially improve work processes and productivity within organisations, employees often hesitate to do so. This paper studies the role of fear (of being fired) and futility (i.e. ... -
Creating pro-environmental behavior change: Economic incentives or norm-nudges?
(DP SAM;15/2024, Working paper, 2024-09)To mitigate global warming, collective behavior change is needed. But which tools should policymakers prioritize: economic incentives, nudges, or a combination? Current evidence from social science provides little direct ... -
Exposure to diversity, social proximity and ingroup bias
(DP SAM;14/2024, Working paper, 2024-07-30)As society becomes increasingly diverse, will changes in an individual’s exposure to diversity influence their interactions with others? I study prosocial behavior in a large-scale U.S. sample, where participants are ... -
Worker Power, Immigrant Sorting, and Firm Dynamics
(DP SAM;13/2024, Working paper, 2024-07-05)This paper examines how worker power shapes the allocation of immigrants across firms, and the subsequent consequences of such sorting on firm performance and the careers of incumbent workers. Our analysis highlights several ... -
Cross-border shopping of alcohol – What is the effect on tax revenue and sales and which products are most affected?
(DP SAM;12/2024, Working paper, 2024-07-04)We use COVID-19 border closings and comprehensive store-level data on Norwegian alcohol sales to quantify the effect cross-border shopping of alcohol on sales volume and commodity tax revenue. Effects are large, for instance ...
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