Research
My primary research interests are economy of education, human capital and political economy.
My thesis advisors are Torsten Persson, David Strömberg and Lisa Laun
Publications
Work in progress
Female Teachers: The Roots of Women’s Emancipation
(with Monir Bounadi, IIES) paper slides short slides
Using our newly created database on the women’s suffrage movement in Sweden (see below), we quantify the importance of female school teachers for the emancipation of women during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Sweden. Using a natural experiment for causal identification, we show that state investment in female teacher training induced a shift toward more work-centered life courses among women. We use an event study design to identify the direct role-model effect on girls who had a female teacher in their youth and a spatial IV design to study the role of teachers as organizers in the subsequent women’s suffrage movement.
Wind Power and Veto Power
(with Stephan Schneider, ETH Zurich)
Every society faces decisions about where to locate infrastructure that benefits the general public but creates concentrated local costs. We examine how the decentralization of decision-making authority affects the allocation of critical yet locally contentious facilities. Focusing on wind energy, we analyze how the introduction of municipal veto power in Sweden empowered local politicians to reject applications for wind turbine sites that would affect a significant number of their constituents.
To quantify the trade-offs between the local \emph{bads} of living close to a wind farm and the global benefits of low-cost electricity production, we estimate the negative capitalization effect of wind turbines on house prices using registry data covering the universe of single-family house transactions.
We complement this short-term causal estimation strategy with a comprehensive simulation procedure. The simulation allows us to compare every planned wind farm in Sweden over the past 25 years with every possible alternative site to which energy producers could have applied
Does Money Matter? Impact of a Redistributive School Funding Formula on School Spending and Student Outcomes
(with Lisa Laun, IFAU & Lena Hensvik, UU)
In this paper, we examine how a redistribution of school funding toward disadvantaged children affects their educational outcomes. We exploit a change in Stockholm’s school funding allocation system in 2012, which generated substantial shifts in resources per student across elementary schools, with clear winners and losers.
We first document the pass-through from funding to spending: higher resources increased total expenditures, primarily on personnel, but also on instructional materials and student health expenditures. In terms of educational attainment, we find no improvement in average outcomes from increased funding. Importantly, however, we find positive effects concentrated in the groups targeted by the reform: children from low-SES households and migrants experienced improved cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes, with effects concentrated among boys.
We conclude that funding reallocation based on the socioeconomic composition of schools is a cost-neutral way to help close the SES achievement gap.
Pre-school or parental care - what is the effect on school performance at age sixteen? Evidence from a Swedish child care reform.
My master thesis from 2019, not updated. paper
Data
Database of the Swedish Suffrage Movement
We have created a database of the Swedish suffrage movement. We contribute novel data on primary school teachers, the first- and second-tier leadership of the suffrage movement, and 350,000 handwritten signatures from a national petition campaign in 1913–14. We then create linkages and refine, for this purpose, existing historical data sources such as the Swedish historical censuses, Rotemansarkivet, and others.
For the school teachers, we develop a machine-learning pipeline for semi-automatic transcription of historical teacher censuses. The handwritten petition signatures are transcribed using a crowdsourcing approach, and the suffrage leadership data are compiled through text analysis and genealogical research.
The transcription of the petition signatures was carried out in collaboration with the National Archives of Sweden and with funding from the Mannerfelt Foundation and Karl Staaff’s Fund.