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A useful starting point for assessing the effect of a shock or intervention is a basis of comparison: those affected by a change versus those not affected. But what if everyone is potentially affected in some way? What if there is no obvious benchmark against which differences can be evaluated? One answer is simply to […]
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Some jobs are disproportionately filled by male workers, while others are dominated by female workers. Goldin’s pollution theory of discrimination offers a novel framework for understanding differences in male and female labour force outcomes.
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Education — whether through formal instruction in schools, or through on-the-job training — is essential in the development of skills. And skills matter for workers’ productive capacity: that is, how we apply ourselves in our working lives. While there is a considerable body of research on the role of education in raising labour quality and […]
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The first universities were founded in Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. In Scandinavia, the oldest extant universities can be found in Uppsala and Copenhagen — both universities opened in the late fifteenth century. My own institution, Lund University, was established in 1666 — following an earlier medieval academy in Lund, which was shuttered […]
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A central question in economics is almost always, “how does X affect Y?”. We look not merely for relationships between variables (as X increases, Y falls), but seek causal explanations (the fall in Y is a result of the increase in X). Unfortunately for this kind of econometric analysis, the world is complex. We seldom […]