Research
Job market paper: Divorce law reform, family stability, and children’s long-term outcomes - Submitted
Abstract: While divorce laws are known to influence family behavior, empirical evidence of their effects on children remains scarce. I shed more light on this by evaluating a 6-month parental reconsideration period for divorce, which was implemented during the Swedish divorce law reform of 1974. I exploit quasi-experimental policy variation and population-wide register data on 1.17 million Swedish children born 1952–1964 to evaluate the implications of family stability on children's long-term human capital outcomes. I find that families with more years of exposure to this divorce restriction are 18.8\% less likely to divorce. The children with greater exposure are also 1.8% more likely to graduate from upper secondary school, and exhibit higher rates of marriage and lower rates of divorce in adulthood. The findings highlight a trade-off between parental freedom of choice related to divorce and externalities on children's outcomes.
Publications: The effects of school closures on SARS-CoV-2 among parents and teachers,
with Helena Svaleryd and Jonas Vlachos - Published in PNAS (2021)
Abstract: To reduce the transmission of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), most countries closed schools, despite uncertainty if school closures are an effective containment measure. At the onset of the pandemic, Swedish upper secondary schools moved to online instruction, while lower secondary school remained open. This allows for a comparison of parents and teachers differently exposed to open and closed schools, but otherwise facing similar conditions. Leveraging rich Swedish register data, we connect all students and teachers in Sweden to their families and study the impact of moving to online instruction on the incidence of SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19. We find that, among parents, exposure to open rather than closed schools resulted in a small increase in PCR-confirmed infections (odds ratio [OR] 1.17; 95% CI [CI95] 1.03–1.32). Among lower secondary teachers, the infection rate doubled relative to upper secondary teachers (OR 2.01; CI95 1.52–2.67). This spilled over to the partners of lower secondary teachers, who had a higher infection rate than their upper secondary counterparts (OR 1.29; CI95 1.00–1.67). When analyzing COVID-19 diagnoses from healthcare visits and the incidence of severe health outcomes, results are similar for teachers, but weaker for parents and teachers' partners. The results for parents indicate that keeping lower secondary schools open had minor consequences for the overall transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in society. The results for teachers suggest that measures to protect teachers could be considered.
Ongoing projects:
How Early Career Choices Adjust to Economic Crises,
with Julien Grenet, Hans Grönqvist, Martin Nybom, and Jan Stuhler - Submitted
Abstract: We study how students adjust their early career choices in response to economic crises, and how this behavioral response affects their long-run labor market outcomes. We specifically examine the the severe recession that struck Sweden in the early 1990s, which disproportionally affected the manufacturing and construction sectors. We find that students who experienced paternal job loss in these heavily affected sectors were more likely to choose high school programs linked to sectors less impacted by the recession. As a result, these individuals achieved better labor market outcomes in adulthood, including higher employment rates and career earnings. Our findings are consistent with informational frictions being a key obstacle to structural change, and we identify career choice as an important mechanism through which recessions reshape labor markets in the very long run.
The effects of water fluoridation during childhood on human capital outcomes
Abstract: The controversy surrounding fluoridation of drinking water largely persists due to concerns about its impact on children's development. This study leverages the water fluoridation experiment conducted in Norrköping, Sweden, 1952–1962 to examine the effects of fluoride exposure during childhood on human capital outcomes. The results show that exposure to water fluoridation during childhood leads to adverse effects on non-cognitive ability around age 18 and on the likelihood of high school graduation, along with some indications of negative effects on cognitive ability. I find no significant effects for cohorts born after the cessation of the experiment.
Early-stage projects:
The importance of family: Temporal trends in the effects of family dissolution during childhood on educational attainment
Time Discounting and Economic Crisis
with Hans Grönqvist
Parenting Styles and Child Outcomes
with Hans Grönqvist