Elin Sundberg
I am a PhD candidate at the Department of Economics, Uppsala University. During the spring of 2022, I visited Booth School of Business, University of Chicago.
My main research interests are in labor economics and gender economics. I am particularly interested in geographic mobility in relation to gender differences in labor market outcomes.
Primary fields: labor economics, gender economics
Secondary fields: family economics, urban economics
E-mail: elin.sundberg@nek.uu.se
Work in Progress
Location Choices and Gender Career Gaps (Job Market Paper)
Moving to Opportunity, Together [PRELIMINARY] (with Seema Jayachandran, Lea Nassal, Matt Notowidigdo, Marie Paul & Heather Sarsons)
Abstract: Many couples face a trade-off between advancing one spouse’s career or the other’s. We study this trade-off by analyzing the earnings effects of relocation and the effects of a job layoff on the likelihood of relocating using detailed administrative data from Germany and Sweden. Using an event-study analysis of couples moving across commuting zones, we find that relocation increases men’s earnings more than women’s, with strikingly similar patterns in Germany and Sweden. Using a sample of mass layoff events, we find that couples in both countries are more likely to relocate in response to the man being laid off compared to the woman. We then investigate whether these gendered patterns reflect men’s higher earnings or a gender norm that prioritizes men’s career advancement. To do this, we develop a model of household decision-making in which households place more weight on the income earned by the man compared to the woman, and we test the model using the subset of couples where the man and woman have similar potential earnings. For both countries, we show that the estimated model can accurately reproduce the reduced-form results, including those not used to estimate the model. The results point to a role for gender norms in explaining the gender gap in the returns to joint moves.
Paternity Leave and Child Outcomes (with Daniel Avdic, Arizo Karimi & Anna Sjögren)
Abstract: We study how fathers’ time impacts children’s human capital using the introduction of earmarked paternity leave in Sweden. We use administrative data on parents’ leave uptake and children’s educational outcomes in a difference-in-discontinuities design, exploiting the plausibly random timing of childbirth. We show that the reform decreased average school-leaving grade point averages of sons of non-college fathers by 0.07 standard deviations and increased intergenerational persistence of human capital by 30 percent. We give suggestive evidence that these findings are explained by asymmetric impacts on parents’ time investments owing to family disruptions and (lack of) substitutability of parents’ time inputs.
Job Flexibility, Household Labor Supply, and the Child Penalty (with Dana Scott)
Employer Strategies to Employee Turnover in the Public Sector (with Arizo Karimi & Pengpeng Xiao)
Articles in Swedish
Boström, E. & A. Sundberg (2018), "Få men fler kvinnor i svensk nationalekonomi", Ekonomisk debatt, 46(4), s. 19–32.