This study examines how a policy that sharply increased alcohol availability during 8.5 months affected the labor productivity of those exposed to it in utero. Compared to the surrounding cohorts, the prenatally exposed children have substantially worse labor market and educational outcomes and lower cognitive and non-cognitive ability. Effects on earnings are found throughout the distribution but are largest below the median. Males are more affected than females, consistent with growing evidence that boys are less resilient to early environmental insults. The long-term effects seem primarily driven by changes in prenatal health, rather than changes in the childhood environment. 

We estimate the long-term mental health impact of an alcohol policy experiment on individuals exposed to the policy in utero. The policy lasted for 8.5 months and significantly expanded access to alcohol, especially for those under age 21. Using administrative data on healthcare visits, drug prescriptions, and psychological assessments, we show that prenatal policy exposure had a substantial, early, and persistent impact on the mental health of the children of young mothers. The exposed cohorts conceived just before the policy started are 16% more likely to be diagnosed with any mental condition in midlife. We find effects on common midlife conditions such as depression and anxiety, on the ability to cope with psychologically stressful situations at age 18, and on neurodevelopmental disorders that manifest in early childhood. The impact of the policy on midlife earnings is significantly reduced for individuals with mental health care needs who reside in areas with lower barriers to accessing mental health care. Overall, our findings indicate that policies increasing access to mental health treatments could substantially improve labor market outcomes, even for conditions with early-life origins.

We study the impact of lead exposure from birth to adulthood and provide evidence on the mechanisms producing these effects. Following 800,000 children differentially exposed to the phaseout of leaded gasoline in Sweden, we find that even a low exposure affects long-run outcomes, that boys are more affected, and that changes in non‑cognitive skills explain a sizeable share of the impact on crime and human capital. The effects are greater above exposure thresholds still relevant for the general population, and reductions in exposure equivalent to the magnitude of the recent redefinition of elevated blood-lead levels can increase earnings by 4%.

Normally, the temperature decreases with altitude, allowing air pollutants to rise and disperse. During inversion episodes, warmer air at higher altitude traps air pollutants at the ground. By merging vertical temperature profile data from NASA with pollution monitors and health care records, we show that inversions increase the PM10 levels by 25% and children’s respiratory health problems by 5.5%. Low-income children are particularly affected, and differences in baseline health seem to be a key mediating factor behind the effect of pollution on the SES health gap. Policies that improve dissemination of information on inversion status may hence improve child health, either through private action or via policies that curb emissions during inversion episodes.

.... SNS summary (in Swedish) can be found here: Luftkvalitet och barns hälsa. Erfarenheter från två naturliga experiment, SNS Analys 70, mars 2021 

This study examines the effects of implementing a congestion tax in central Stockholm on both ambient air pollution and the population health of local children.  We demonstrate that the tax reduced ambient air pollution by 5 to 10 percent, and this reduction in air pollution was associated with a significant decrease in the rate of acute asthma attacks among young children.  The change in health was more gradual than the change in pollution suggesting that it may take time for the full health effects of changes in pollution to be felt. Given the sluggish adjustment of health to pollution changes, short-run estimates of the pollution reduction programs may understate the long-run health benefits.

....VOXEU summary (here)

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We document the individual, organizational, and field-wide impacts following a public disclosure of substantial male bias in the competence assessments of newly minted PhDs applying for an important individual grant from the Swedish NIH. Post-disclosure, three key changes occurred: (i) a rapid phase-out of male-only review committees, (ii) adjustments in the decision-making processes of reviewers, and (iii) an elimination of the average male bias. We follow applicants’ publications, promotions, and earnings up to 18 years after application. We document an increase in the allocative efficiency of the research grants: the long-run research output of grantees assigned to review committees with an average pre-disclosure bias increased by 27 percent of a standard deviation compared to those assigned to unbiased committees. The disclosure of bias prompted coordinated actions with broader downstream academic and societal impact: female enrollment in biomedical PhD programs increased by 10 percentage points relative to other fields – in turn increasing female health focused research by 20 percent, without crowding out attention to men’s health.

We study a size-contingent law in Norway that grants workers the right to board representation in firms with 30 or more employees. To analyze the impact of the law, we embed the regulation into an equilibrium model of the labor market. We show how to use behavioral responses to the regulation to identify (i) the direct effects of the policy on regulated firms and workers, (ii) the distortions from firms adjusting their size to avoid the regulation, and (iii) the equilibrium effects in the labor market. We evaluate these effects on firm profits and production, as well as on worker compensation, including both wages and non-wage amenities.

This paper provides a simple, yet robust framework to evaluate the time profile of benefits paid during an unemployment spell. We derive sufficient-statistics formulae capturing the marginal insurance value and incentive costs of unemployment benefits paid at different times during a spell. Our approach allows us to revisit separate arguments for inclining or declining profiles put forward in the theoretical literature and to identify welfare-improving changes in the benefit profile that account for all relevant arguments jointly. For the empirical implementation, we use administrative data on unemployment, linked to data on consumption, income and wealth in Sweden. First, we exploit duration-dependent kinks in the replacement rate and find that, if anything, the moral hazard cost of benefits is larger when paid earlier in the spell. Second, we find that the drop in consumption affecting the insurance value of benefits is large from the start of the spell, but further increases throughout the spell. In trading of insurance and incentives, our analysis suggests that the at benefit profile in Sweden has been too generous overall. However, both from the insurance and the incentives side, we find no evidence to support the recent introduction of a declining tilt in the profile.

This paper studies whether adverse selection can rationalize a universal mandate for unemployment insurance (UI). Building on a unique feature of the unemployment policy in Sweden, where workers can opt for supplemental UI coverage above a minimum mandate, we provide the first direct evidence for adverse selection in UI and derive its implications for UI design. We find that the unemployment risk is more than twice as high for workers who buy supplemental coverage. Exploiting variation in risk and prices, we show how 25-30% of this correlation is driven by risk-based selection, with the remainder driven by moral hazard. Due to the moral hazard - and despite the adverse selection - we find that mandating the supplemental coverage to individuals with low willingness-to-pay would be sub-optimal. We show under which conditions a design leaving choice to workers would dominate a UI system with a single mandate. In this design, using a subsidy for supplemental coverage is optimal and complementary to the use of a minimum mandate.

We utilize a large-scale randomized social experiment to identify how co-workers affect each other's effort as measured by work absence. The experiment altered the work absence incentives for half of all employees living in Göteborg, Sweden. Using administrative data we are able to recover the treatment status of all workers in more than 3,000 workplaces. We first document that employees in workplaces with a high proportion of treated co-workers increase their own absence level significantly. We then examine the heterogeneity of the treatment effect in order to explore what mechanisms are underlying the peer effect. Although a strong effect of having a high proportion of treated co-workers is found for the non-treated workers, no significant effects are found for the treated workers. These results suggest that pure altruistic social preferences can be ruled out as the main motivator for the behavior of a non-negligible proportion of the employees in our sample.

This paper examines how fertility decisions are transmitted within the workplace. Informed by a simple real options model of investments under uncertainty, we show that recent births among coworkers affect women’s subsequent childbearing using population-wide matched employer-employee panel data. We further document that the peer effect varies with the degree of similarity between co-workers, and that social influences, rather than social learning, seems to be the key mechanism behind the fertility peer effect. 

We study the presence of other-regarding preferences in the workplace by exploiting a randomized experiment that changed the monitoring of workers’ health during sick leave. We show that workers’ response to an increase in co-worker shirking, induced by the experiment, is much stronger than the response to a decrease in co-worker shirking. The asymmetric spillover effects are consistent with evidence of fairness concerns documented in laboratory experiments. Moreover, we find that the spillover effects are driven by workers with highly flexible and independent jobs, suggesting that co‑worker monitoring and peer pressure may be at least as important as formal monitoring in alleviating shirking in the workplace.