Transfers from parents—either in the form of gifts or inheritances—have received much attention as a source of inequality. This paper uses administrative data for the population of Norway to examine the share of the Total Inflows (defined as the capitalized sum of net labor income, government transfers, and gifts and inheritances received over the period) accounted for by capitalized gifts and inheritances. Consistent with other work, we find that there is much inequality in the receipt of gifts and inheritances. However, gifts and inheritances represent a small share of Total Inflows; this is true across the distribution of Total Inflows, as well as at all levels of net wealth. Gifts and inheritances are only an important source of income flows among those who have very wealthy parents. Additionally, gifts and inheritances have very little effect on the distribution of Total Inflows, suggesting that inheritance taxes may do little to mitigate inequality.

This paper provides novel evidence on the causal effect of high school Grade Point Average (GPA) on the human capital development and labor market trajectory of individuals. Causal identification is achieved by exploiting a unique feature of the Norwegian education system that produces exogenous variation in GPA among high school students. We find little effect on the number of completed years of higher education, but significant effects on the number and quality of higher education programs available to students after high school. Most importantly, we find persistent effects on students' long-run labor market outcomes, most notably market wage.

We estimate health associations across generations using information on healthcare visits from administrative data for the entire Norwegian population. A parental mental health diagnosis is associated with a 9.3 percentage point (40%) higher probability of a mental health diagnosis of their adolescent child. Intensive margin physical and mental health associations are similar, and extended family estimates account for 42% of the intergenerational persistence. We also show that a policy targeting additional health resources for the young children of adults diagnosed with mental health conditions reduced the parent-child mental health association by 39%.

In this paper, we use comprehensive administrative data on the population of Norway to create a measure of lifetime resources, which generates several stylized facts. First, lifetime resources are highly correlated with net wealth, but net wealth is more unequally distributed. Second, labor income is the most important component of lifetime resources, except among the top 1 percent where capital income and capital gains on financial assets become important. Lastly, lifetime resources are a better predictor of child human capital outcomes than net wealth, suggesting that, in some cases, inequality in lifetime resources may be more relevant than inequality in wealth.

Although many students suffer from anxiety and depression, and often identify school pressure and concerns about their futures as the main reasons for their worries, little is known about the consequences of the schooling environment on students' mental health. Using a regression discontinuity analysis in the largest Norwegian cities, we show that eligibility to enrol in a higher achievement high school increases the probability of enrolment in higher education and decreases the probability of diagnosis or treatment of psychological conditions. We provide suggestive evidence that changes in both teacher and peers' characteristics are likely drivers of these effects. 

Using administrative data from Norway, we document that gifts and inheritances are a more important component of total income for women than for men. This is particularly true at the very top of the distributions of total lifetime income and net wealth. These differences are not due to gender differences in the receipt of intergenerational transfers but are driven by gender differences in total income. When we calculate counterfactual distributions of total lifetime income where gifts and inheritances are equalized across all individuals, we find that gifts and inheritances tend to reduce gender gaps across the distribution.

Family formation has been substantially delayed in recent decades, and birth rates have fallen below the replacement rates in many OECD countries. Research suggests that these trends are tightly linked to recent changes in the labor market; however, little is known about the role played by increases in job insecurity. In this paper, I investigate whether the type of employment, stable or temporary, affects the timing of cohabitation and fertility. Using French data on the work and family history of large samples of young adults, I provide evidence that being permanently employed has a much stronger effect than being in temporary employment on the probability of entering a first cohabiting relationship as well as on the probability of having a first child. These findings suggest that increases in age at first cohabitation and at first child can partly be explained by the rise in unemployment and in the share of temporary jobs among young workers.

In most developed countries, students have to choose a major field of study during high school. This is an important decision as it largely determines subsequent educational and occupational choices. Using French data, this paper reveals that enrollment at a more selective high school, with higher-achieving peers, has no impact on boys, but a strong impact on girls' choices: they turn away from scientific fields and settle for less competitive ones. Our results are not consistent with two commonly-advanced explanations for gender differences in field of study, namely disparities in prior academic preparation and in sensitivity to rank in class.

We estimate intergenerational mobility of immigrants and their children in fifteen receiving countries. We document large income gaps for first-generation immigrants that diminish in the second generation. Around half of the second-generation gap can be explained by differences in parental income, with the remainder due to differential rates of absolute mobility. The daughters of immigrants enjoy higher absolute mobility than daughters of locals in most destinations, while immigrant sons primarily enjoy this advantage in countries with long histories of immigration. Cross-country differences in absolute mobility are not driven by parental country-of-origin, but instead by destination labor markets and immigration policy.

In many countries, access to top science programs is determined by standardized competitive exams. If they fail, candidates are generally allowed to repeat their preparation and retake the exams. Relying on French data, we assess the impact of repetition on repeaters as well as on non-repeaters at the margin of repetition. Both groups appear to benefit equally from repetition, suggesting that students do not self-select into repeating based on their potential progress. Students who choose to repeat are predominantly male and high-income, which contributes to the persistence of significant income and gender gaps in access to top science programs.

This paper investigates the effect of grouping students by prior achievement into different classes in a context where students are preparing for the entrance exams to elite graduate programs offering a limited number of seats. We show that this policy has, on average, positive effects on students’ performance and rankings. However, these improvements mainly concern students who were the strongest at the start of the preparation period, among whom children from privileged backgrounds are largely over-represented. Ultimately, the practice of grouping students by prior achievement into different classes increases inequalities in access to elite programs between children from different backgrounds.