Long-Term Effects of Childhood Nutrition: Evidence from a School Lunch Reform (co-authored with Jesper Alex-Petersen and Petter Lundborg, 2nd r&r at ReSTUD)
We examine the long-term impact of a policy that introduced free and nutritious school lunches in Swedish primary schools. For this purpose, we use historical data on the gradual implementation of the policy across municipalities and employ a difference-in-differences design to estimate the impact of this lunch policy on a broad range of medium and longterm outcomes, including lifetime income, health, cognitive skills, and education. Our results show that the school lunch program generated substantial long-term benefits, where pupils exposed to the program during their entire primary school period have 3 percent greater life-time earnings. In addition, we find the effect to be greater for pupils that were exposed at earlier ages and for pupils from poor households. Finally, exposure to the school lunch program had substantial effects on educational attainment and health and these effects can explain a large part of the return to school lunches.
Currently we are collecting data on school absence in the 1960s to address whether this is a potential mechanism behind the result or not.
Does integration change gender attitudes? The effect of randomly assigning women to traditionally male teams (co-authored with Gordon Dahl and Andreas Kotsadam, accepted at the QJE)
We examine whether exposure of men to women in a traditionally male-dominated environment can change attitudes about mixed-gender productivity, gender roles and gender identity. Our context is the military in Norway, where we randomly assigned female recruits to some squads but not others during boot camp. We find that living and working with women for 8 weeks causes men to adopt more egalitarian attitudes. There is a 14 percentage point increase in the fraction of men who think mixed-gender teams perform as well or better than same-gender teams, an 8 percentage point increase in men who think household work should be shared equally and a 14 percentage point increase in men who do not completely disavow feminine traits. Contrary to the predictions of many policymakers, we find no evidence that integrating women into squads hurt male recruits' satisfaction with boot camp or their plans to continue in the military. These findings provide evidence that even in a highly gender-skewed environment, gender stereotypes are malleable and can be altered by integrating members of the opposite sex.
Currently we are awaiting data from the Norwegian military on military outcomes.
Field of Study in High School and Career Outcomes for Marginal Students (co-authored with Gordon Dahl and Anders Stenberg)
a first draft is soon to be available
Backlash in attitudes after the election of extreme political parties (co-authored with Magnus Carlsson and Gordon Dahl)
Far-right and far-left parties by definition occupy the fringes of politics, with policy proposals outside the mainstream. This paper asks how public attitudes about such policies respond once an extreme party increases their political representation at the local level. We study attitudes towards the signature policies of two radical populist parties in Sweden, one from the right and one from the left, using panel data from 290 municipal election districts. To identify causal effects, we take advantage of large nonlinearities in the function which assigns council seats, comparing otherwise similar elections where a party either barely wins or loses an additional seat. We estimate that a one seat increase for the far-right, anti-immigration party decreases negative attitudes towards immigration by 5.1 percentage points, in opposition to the party’s policy position. Likewise, when a far-left, anti-capitalist party politician gets elected, support for a six hour workday falls by 2.7 percentage points. Mirroring these attitudinal changes, the far-right and far-left parties experience no incumbency advantage in the next election. Exploring possible mechanisms, we find evidence that when the anti-immigrant party wins a marginal seat, they experience higher levels of politician turnover before the next election and receive negative coverage in local newspapers. These findings demonstrate that political representation can cause an attitudinal backlash as fringe parties and their ideas are placed under closer scrutiny.
Explaining the gender wage gap among recent college graduates: Pre-labor market factors or employer discrimination (co-authored with Magnus Carlsson and Abdulaziz Abrar Reshid)
We investigate the gender wage gap upon labor market entry among recent college graduates in Sweden and find a raw male-female wage gap of 12 percent. After adding controls for pre-labor market factors, only a gap of approximately 2.9 percent remains. Hence, pre-labor market factors, and especially the type of college major, explain the bulk of the initial gender wage gap, and there is little that can be attributed to employer discrimination. However, given the high minimum wages in the Swedish labor market discrimination may not be apparent in wages. Instead, employers may discriminate against women in hiring. Using data from a hiring experiment, we do not find any evidence of this. On the contrary, female job applicants tend to be preferred over male job applicants.