Profile

I am a labour economist with a research agenda that is mostly centered around a life-cycle perspective on earnings- and consumption dynamics. My work focuses on the quantitative importance of various sources of income risk faced by individuals and households throughout their lives.

In my job market paper I explore the nature of income dynamics over the business cycle using administrative panel data covering the whole Norwegian population between 1979 – 2013. I find that the income process differs systematically over the business cycle by age, income, skill level and their interaction. My findings also suggest that the redistributive nature of the Norwegian tax–transfer system plays a key role in attenuating the increased left-skewness risk of income shocks during recessions, especially among the low skilled. The estimated income process is then used to study the implications for the welfare costs of business cycles and its distribution among the population in a life-cycle model of consumption and savings.

Other work of mine has focused on income and consumption dynamics in a structural framework that provides a decomposition of lifecycle inequality in earnings and consumption resulting from heterogeneity in ability, heterogeneity in the rate of human capital accumulation, search frictions (the random allocation of similar workers to different jobs) and the interaction of human capital and search friction (a worker's history of job opportunities may differentially affect her human capital accumulation opportunities).

Apart from income and consumption dynamics, I have also been working on the role of the financial sector in the transitional dynamics of unemployment and vacancies in an equilibrium matching model. The quantitative analysis of the model suggests, that the lack of an improvement in the financial sector's effectiveness to intermediate resources in the aftermath of the Great Recession played a crucial role in the slow recovery of the labor market.