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 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.
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.
Awards: Winner of the 2020 IPUMS International Research Student Award; Winner of the Young Researcher Award in Economics and Technical Sciences of the Royal Society of Sciences in Uppsala; Honorable Mention for the Urban Economics Association Prize for Best Student Paper; Selected for the 2023 EALE Job Market Tour
Link to working paper: Link [2nd round R&R to the Journal of Development Economics].
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 [Resubmitted to the Journal of Political Economy: Microeconomics].
The effect of childhood urban residency on earnings: Evidence from Brazil
Abstract: Despite the large urban-rural income gaps visible across the developing world, it remains unclear to what extent these reflect the causal effect of urban residency. This paper presents new evidence by estimating the effect of childhood urban residency on labor market outcomes using an age-at-move design combined with Brazilian census data. The analyses show that spending childhood in an urban environment significantly increases earnings and wages in adulthood. Around half of the effect is explained by an increase in educational attainment. The findings suggest that the previous literature underestimates the impact of urban residency on earnings by 50%.
Link to working paper: Link [Submitted]
Location and educational signals
Abstract: Place shapes the educational attainment of children, yet the reasons remain poorly understood. In this paper, I investigate the role of spatial differences in educational signals received by students. Using Dutch administrative data combined with high-stakes national exam scores, I show that students receive less ambitious track recommendations in rural areas conditional on ability. The spatial difference is comparable to the impact of having a university-educated parent and explains around half of the spatial difference in academic track enrollment. Key mechanisms are spillovers from high SES peers and stronger beliefs in the importance of education among urban teachers.
Link to working paper: Link [Submitted]
Early Childhood Development and the Dynamics of Human Capital Formation among Disadvantaged Youth (With Olof Aslund, Per-Anders Edin, and Gustaf Gredebäck)
Improving school-to-school transitions: the role of information transfers (With Olof Aslund, Per-Anders Edin, Gustaf Gredebäck, Jenny Kiessing, and Matthias Nordin)
Parental separations and childhood outcomes (With Yaroslav Yakymovych)
Social housing and labor market outcomes (With Sebastian Siegloch and Max Guennewig-Moenert)
The missing urban migration: unobserved migration barriers or slow convergence towards spatial equilibrium?
"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