Research

We explore the role of identity along multiple dimensions in high-stakes decision-making. Our data contain information about demographic and socioeconomic indicators for randomly assigned jurors and defendants in a Swedish court. Our results show that defendants are 15 percent less likely to get a prison sentence if they and the jurors belong to the same identity-forming groups. Socioeconomic background and demographic attributes are at least as important, and combining several identities produces stronger effects. 

We study the intergenerational effect of education policy on crime.  We use Swedish administrative data that links outcomes across generations with crime records, and we show that the comprehensive school reform, gradually implemented between 1949 and 1962, reduced conviction rates both for the generation directly affected by the reform and for their sons. The reduction in conviction rates occurred in many types of crime. The key mediators of this reduction in child generation are an increase in education and household income and a decrease in crime among their fathers

Using harmonized administrative data from Scandinavia, we find that intergenerational rank associations in income have increased uniformly across Sweden, Denmark, and Norway for cohorts born between 1951 and 1979. Splitting these trends by gender, we find that fatherson mobility has been stable, while family correlations for mothers and daughters trend upwards. Similar patterns appear in US survey data, albeit with slightly different timing. Finally, based on evidence from records on occupations and educational attainments, we argue that the observed decline in intergenerational mobility is consistent with female skills becoming increasingly valued in the labor market. 

Growing evidence shows that 1) police officer performance differs by personal characteristics, and 2) many countries are struggling to retain officers. How do different types of officers respond to different retention strategies? We study this using detailed Swedish data that include officers' emotional stability (as measured in military enlistment assessments). Using geographic shocks to outside options, we show that higher relative pay increases retention, but especially so for less emotionally stable officers. Using exogenous manager turnover in the midst of organizational crisis, we show that more stable management also increases retention, particularly for more emotionally stable officers. These results suggest that strategies for increased officer retention can vary in their effects on the composition of the police force.

Most juvenile offenders are given some form of community-based sanction, but little evidence exists on whether these can improve the lifetime trajectories of youth. I evaluate the effects of a youth justice reform in Sweden that sharply increased the use of court-ordered community service --- i.e. unpaid, low-skilled work. The new sanction replaced fines and rehabilitation. On average, the reform did not affect recidivism or labor market outcomes, but these average effects mask considerable heterogeneity depending on the most likely alternative sanction. In particular, post-reform recidivism and adult incarceration rates are lower for individuals for whom community service replaces fines, while the opposite is true for rehabilitation. I then evaluate the net financial effect of the policy and analyze how the program could be targeted for improved efficiency. Overall, the results show that community service is a good alternative to fines for all youth offenders, but repeat offenders and youth from disadvantaged areas might benefit more from a pure rehabilitative sanction.

We decompose the change in the gender earnings gap in Sweden over 51 years into working hours, wage inequality, and selection. The observed change is a composite of negatively and positively interacting forces. (1) about half of the change in the gender earnings gap can be attributed to more equal working hours; (2) changes in the wage distribution contribute to most of the reduction in the wage gap 1968-1991 but hide gender convergence in 1991-2019; (3) selection accounts for about half of the decrease in the gender wage gap 1968-2019. Simultaneously accounting for both selection and inequality is important.