Swedish migration policy liberalization and new immigrant entrepreneurs

Sweden has allowed immigrants from any country to obtain residence permits for entrepreneurship since 2008. The aim of this study was to explore the outcome of this policy. The study adds time perspective and superdiversity and operationalizes the mixed embeddedness framework to facilitate a quantitative study on three levels of analysis. Detailed register data for two cohorts of immigrants—those who arrived four years before and those who arrived four years after the reform—are used. The results confirm the usefulness of the mixed embeddedness model, that is the institutional regulative context, economic and social context, and individual resources, in the analysis of immigrant entrepreneurship. However, the study shows that the propensity to engage in entrepreneurship is more affected for refugees and students than for migrants with a residence permit for work and entrepreneurship. This indicates a need for further facilitating the process to immigrate for entrepreneurial reasons.     

University Education as a Compensation Strategy Among Second‐Generation Immigrants

The aim of this study is to determine whether immigrants and their children use a compensation strategy that involves achieving higher than expected education, given their parents’ level of education and income. The study uses data for all individuals in Sweden who finished elementary school from 1990 to 1992. Parents’ level of education and income is in general positively associated with higher odds of having university education. However, some immigrant groups show the reverse pattern of the impact of parents’ income. The results support a compensation strategy developed in groups and families with low level of integration in the labor market.     

Estimating German overqualification with stochastic earnings frontiers

We estimate individual potential income with stochastic earnings frontiers to measure overqualification as the ratio between actual income and potential income. To do this, we remove a drawback of the IAB employment sample, the censoring of the income data, by multiple imputation. The measurement of overqualification by the income ratio is also a valuable addition to the overeducation literature because the well-established objective or subjective overeducation measures focus on some ordinal matching aspects and ignore the metric income and efficiency aspects of overqualification.     

The Extramarital Affair: A Language of Yearning and Loss

This paper presents an extramarital relationship as an experience of self-enhancement, not of pathological conflict. It will suggest that the simultaneous relationship with the lover AND an empathically attuned therapist can be healing for the patient. It is seen as often an opportunity for essential developmental needs to be fulfilled when damaging failures in the bond between child and caretaker have restricted the vitalizing atmosphere of mutual influence that results in unrecognized subjectivity. Rather than viewed as a reality-escaping midlife enactment, these relationships can be better thought of as efforts to revisit the traumatic experiences that have created the organizing patterns that have limited a patient's self-development. An extramarital affair is often about yearning and loss and the freedom to enact one's own desire.     

Estimating the Technology of Cognitive and Noncognitive Skill Formation

This paper formulates and estimates multistage production functions for children's cognitive and noncognitive skills. Skills are determined by parental environments and investments at different stages of childhood. We estimate the elasticity of substitution between investments in one period and stocks of skills in that period to assess the benefits of early investment in children compared to later remediation. We establish nonparametric identification of a general class of production technologies based on nonlinear factor models with endogenous inputs. A by‐product of our approach is a framework for evaluating childhood and schooling interventions that does not rely on arbitrarily scaled test scores as outputs and recognizes the differential effects of the same bundle of skills in different tasks. Using the estimated technology, we determine optimal targeting of interventions to children with different parental and personal birth endowments. Substitutability decreases in later stages of the life cycle in the production of cognitive skills. It is roughly constant across stages of the life cycle in the production of noncognitive skills. This finding has important implications for the design of policies that target the disadvantaged. For most configurations of disadvantage it is optimal to invest relatively more in the early stages of childhood than in later stages.