Essays on human capital development, wage dynamics and religious participation

This dissertation consists of four empirical essays and an introductory chapter that puts the findings of the separate essays into context. The first essay compares different wage setting models to one another using Finnish linked employer-employee data. The main finding of this essay is that during a job spell, past labor market conditions have only little persistent effects on a workers current wages. The following two essays study the long term consequences of evacuating Finnish child-evacuees to foster care in Sweden during World War II. The second essay shows that children assigned to a foster family of high socioeconomic status (SES) were more likely to be enrolled in general secondary school and more likely to graduate from University that the children placed in families of lower SES. The third essay finds a null effect of the evacuation program on adult depression while controlling for key preintervention variables. The fourth essay looks at how economic incentives affect church membership using Finnish data. The finding is that economic incentives do on average play a role in the likelihood of being a member of state church.