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Recent Swedish collective bargaining agreements have incorporated provisions for local pay review talks and opportunities for individuals to negotiate their own wages. Using trade union data, we show that members who participate in local pay review talks and members who negotiate their own wages have significantly higher monthly wages than those who do not. Pay decentralization either improves an individual's bargaining position or attracts more productive trade union members. Either way, trade union wage policies to increase individual-level wage variance are achieving their intended effects. Copyright (c) Blackwell Publishing Ltd/London School of Economics 2008.

We use data on 19 000 siblings to investigate whether earnings vary among students who graduated from different colleges in Sweden. We run separate within-family regressions for whole siblings, sisters and brothers. The results show that earnings vary significantly among students who have graduated from different colleges. The cross-sectional estimates are up to twice the within-family estimates, showing that a regression estimator of college effects that does not adjust properly for family characteristics will overestimate the earnings premium of college type as well as the differences in earnings after graduation from different colleges. There is a significant relationship between college type and earnings, even when we control for area of residence after college education. The paper also examines the extent to which differences among colleges, in the proportion of teachers with doctoral degrees, explain the differences in earnings premium. We find that the earnings premium of college type becomes insignificant when adding the proportion of teachers with doctoral degrees to the analysis.

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