Abstract: Romantic relationships in the workplace are common, but those between managers and subordinates have increasingly drawn scrutiny. Using administrative data on the universe of cohabiting couples in Finland, we examine the career implications of starting or ending a personal relationship with a workplace manager and the spillovers of these relationships on the broader workforce. An event study design reveals that entering a relationship with a manager increases the subordinate's earnings by 6%, but breaking up triggers an abrupt 18% earnings decline. We also find that these relationships generate spillovers: retention of other workers declines by six percentage points, with effects concentrated in workplaces where subordinates experience greater earnings gains. Our findings highlight both the private benefits and organizational costs of hierarchical workplace relationships.

Abstract: Children are exposed to very different peers in childhood depending on where they grow up and which schools they attend. In this paper, we study the population-wide, long-term effect of peer composition in childhood on individuals' future occupational choices. We use within-school, across-cohort variation to identify the effects of peers on occupational choice and other outcomes. Using rich, population-wide administrative data from Finland, we show that a one standard deviation increase in exposure to children from a white collar parental background at age 15 has a significant effect on the likelihood of being in a white collar occupation at age 30. Furthermore, we show that there is a stronger effect at finer occupational levels and that these effects are strongest when one's own parent is from a different occupation. Finally, we compare the effect of schoolmates to those of other social ties. We find that the causal effects of peers in the neighborhood, while significant, are about half as large as the causal effects of peers in school

Abstract: We estimate the earnings impacts of graduating into a recession across socioeconomic backgrounds through two innovations. First, given most people from low-income backgrounds do not attend university, we examine all education groups. We find large and persistent negative impacts on university graduates. In contrast, we only find short-run negative impacts for secondary and advanced-vocational graduates. Second, we find little evidence wealthier parents mitigate these income losses; small significant differences by parental background only appear for secondary graduates. We propose and test differential human capital accumulation on-the-job by education group and mobility as explanations for these results.