Work in progress

Gender and Economics

Talking About My Genderation: The Economics of Gender Transitions in Sweden. Joint with Ian Burn (SOFI/Liverpool), Ylva Moberg (SOFI) and Lucas Tilley (Uppsala)

The transgender population in Sweden has drastically increased in the past decade. In 2004, about 700 individuals had received a gender dysphoria diagnosis in Sweden, with that number growing to over 6,000 in 2018. Despite being one of the most vulnerable groups in society, there is little research on the living conditions of transgender individuals. Previous research mostly uses small qualitative interviews or surveys, and cannot provide a representative picture of the transgender community. Our project leverages high-quality register data from Sweden, and investigates the interplay between labor market and health outcomes, as well as the effect of policy for transgender individuals. The project study all adults who have received gender-affirming care in Sweden through 2018. This is a subset of the true transgender population since not all transgender individuals seek care, but it is the most significant representative sample of transgender individuals in the literature. Comparisons will be made to a properly matched sample of non-transgender people.

Gender and Networks on corporate boards. Joint with Nina Smith (Business Economics)

We investigate how professional networks, such as coworkers, affect the probability of getting promoted to a board of directors and whether the effect is gendered. Our employer-employee data set from the Danish labor market, 1995-2011, can connect directors and their labor market histories. In four types of networks, we show that women have fewer connections than men. A larger network is associated with a higher probability of getting into a board of directors, and the effect is larger for men. One explanation is that men in contrast to women have connections to larger and listed firms, and other males – attributes associated with a positive effect on promotions. Also, we find no evidence of substitution between network connections and formal qualifications of directors.

Gender differences in the labor market: A matter of social and economic class. Joint with Mahmood Arai (Economics) and Michael Lundholm(Economics)

In this study, we ask how the observed gender gap in labor market outcomes vary with socioeconomic status measured as an accumulated wealth of parents. Individuals that have parents with similar incomes might have different accumulated wealth, in particular at top and the bottom of the wage distribution. Bequests might perpetuate the social gender roles – women ending up choosing more communal occupations while men choose agentic occupations leading to higher pay. Sweden is characterizied by high gender occupational segregation and in behavioral economics, the gender gap in occupational choice is partly attributed to preferences of competitiveness. While there is a large literature investigating gender gaps in labor market outcomes across the wage distribution within the same generation, there is still little research investigating how these gender gaps vary across parental income and wealth distributions. We have collected data on the bequests available on inventory sheets and then matched it with administrative registers on demographics and labor market information from Swedish Statistics (SCB). Our findings support that the gender gap in wages is increasing by socioeconomic status measured by bequests from the parental generation – indicating that the propagation of gender roles is strongest among the rich.