Research
Publications
The urban-rural education gap: do cities indeed make us smarter?
Abstract: Despite a large urban-rural education gap in many countries, little attention has been paid to whether cities enjoy a comparative advantage in the production of human capital. Using Dutch administrative data, this paper finds that conditional on family characteristics and highly predictive measures of cognitive ability, children who grow up in urban regions consistently attain higher levels of human capital compared to children in rural regions. The elasticity of university attendance with respect to density is 0.07, which is robust across a wide variety of specifications. Hence, the paper highlights an alternative channel to explain the rise of the city.
Published in the Journal of Economic Geography (2021): Link. In the top-5 most read articles since May 2021
Working papers
Urbanization and educational attainment: evidence from Africa (Job Market Paper)
Abstract: Despite the rapid urbanization of the developing world, little remains known about how urban residency and migration affect childhood outcomes. Using census data for 14 African countries combined with an age-at-move design, I show that childhood exposure to cities significantly increases primary school completion and literacy rates of children, even for poor urban households. The availability of schools and the lower opportunity costs of education appear to be the main factors explaining the higher education attainment in urban regions. The paper thus provides evidence of a novel channel through which urban migration can promote economic development in developing countries.
Selected for the 2023 EALE Job Market Tour, Winner of the 2020 IPUMS International Research Award, Winner of the Young Scholar Award in Economics and Technical Sciences of the Royal Society of Sciences in Uppsala, and recipient of an honorable Mention for the Urban Economics Association Prize for Best Student Paper.
Link to working paper: Link [submitted].
The effect of childhood urban residency on earnings: Evidence from Brazil
Abstract: Despite the large urban-rural income gap across the developing world, it remains unclear to what degree this reflects the causal effect of urban residency. This paper presents new evidence by investigating the effect of urban residency during childhood on economic outcomes in adulthood. Causal identification is obtained from an age-at-move design combined with high-quality Brazilian census data. The analysis shows that spending childhood in an environment one log-point denser increases adulthood earnings and wages by 2 - 3 percent. Around half of this effect is due to an increase in educational attainment. The findings suggest that the previous literature, by exclusively focusing on the effects of urban residency during adulthood, has underestimated the causal effect of urban residency on earnings by 50%.
Link to working paper: Link
Location and educational signals: do students in rural locations receive less ambitious teacher recommendations?
Abstract: Students in rural areas underperform in educational outcomes across the globe, but the mechanisms behind this remain unclear. In this paper, I investigate whether students in rural areas receive less ambitious signals regarding their ability and educational prospects. Using data on teacher recommendations and national exam scores, I show that students in rural areas receive significantly less ambitious secondary school track recommendations conditional on observed ability. This difference is not explained by the spatial selection of households or unobserved heterogeneity in ability, is visible for all demographic groups, and is strongest for students on the margin of admission to the academic track. The spatial differences are sizable, and comparable in magnitude to the previously established effects of individual and household characteristics on teacher recommendations.
Link to working paper: Link
The Effects of Worker Displacement During the Industrial Revolution: Evidence from Sweden (with Niklas Bengtsson and Adrian Poignant)
Abstract: We combine a novel data source on the 19th-century Swedish iron industry with linked census data to study the consequences of worker displacement during the second industrial revolution. Ironworkers displaced by the industrial transformation exited the iron industry at higher rates, were more likely to migrate internally, and ended up in occupations that paid 10% less compared to non-displaced workers. While the displacement effects persist over time for workers, we find no evidence of spillovers on their children. To our knowledge, this paper is the first to quantify the effects of worker displacement during the second industrial revolution.
Link to working paper: Link [submitted]
Work in progress
The missing urban migration: unobserved migration barriers or slow convergence towards spatial equilibrium?
Should we all drive a Volvo? The role of public policy in pricing the safety externality of vehicles
Early Childhood Development and the Dynamics of Human Capital Formation among Disadvantaged Youth (With Olof Aslund, Per-Anders Edin, and Gustaf Gredebäck)
Pre-PhD research
"How large are the non-travel time effects of urban highway tunneling? Evidence from Maastricht, the Netherlands." Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice 130 (2019): 570-592. (With J. Tijm, T. Michielsen and P. Zwaneveld). Link to paper
Firm heterogeneity and exports in the Netherlands: Identifying export potential beyond firm productivity. The Journal of International Trade & Economic Development, 29 (2020), 36-68. (With S. Brakman, H. Garretsen and P. Zwaneveld). Link to paper