Research
My primary research interests are political economy, economic history and economy of education.
Publications
Work in progress
Female Teachers and the Emancipation of Women
(with Monir Bounadi, IIES) This paper studies the role of female teachers and the emancipation of women, measured by women’s participation in the labor market and in the political arena. We document the feminization of the teaching profession in Sweden, beginning with the 1859 reform when women gained access to teaching positions in the public school system. By the end of the 19th century, around 18% of school districts across the country had hired a female teacher. Exploiting the staggered entry of female teachers across school districts, we show that exposure to female teachers during childhood shifted women toward a more emancipated life course. Our estimates imply that by the 1910s, women who had a female teacher were 18% more likely to participate in the campaign for women´s suffrage and 9% more likely to enter a non-domestic occupation. In addition, we quantify the role of the first female teachers as political organizers. We conclude that female teachers made an important contribution to the political and economic emancipation of women in Sweden, with stronger effects in the political sphere. paper
A penny for your song - Popular music and political mobilization
Collecting data on the content and distribution of broadside music to investigate the use of popular music in early democratic political movements.
Long Run Effects of Single-Sex Education
While the long run trend in primary education has been towards coeducational schools with mixed-gender classroom many countries still allow for separate primary and seccondary school, and many developing countries this is the dominant school form. As of 2023 the internatioanl Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) study covering more than 60 countries show that approximately 10 (15) percent of 10 (14) year old attend a single-sex school. The study covers mostly developed countries and while China has largely coed schools while Indian schools still are predominately gender segregated. For both policy makers and parents the decission to choose or allow single-sex schools can have large implications for both human capital development, and for the gender additudes in a society, yet there is a lack of crediable estimates of long-run effect on student. Cross sectional data make identification complicated, either due to a lack of within country variation or from selection issues. In this paper these problems are overcome by using temporal variation in coeducational policies in Swedish cities during the turn of the \nth{20} century. Exploiting the fact that small school districs were coeducational, due to capacity constraints, and cities, when large enough to sustain multiple schools, opted for single-sex school an event study design can be uses as a natural experiment, controling for unobserved differences between individuals attending same-sex or coeducational schools. By linking individuals in the full count historical censuses to their childhood school districs it is possible to estimate effect on long term outcomes such as labor force participation, family formation and for women, political participation.
Wind power and veto power
(with Stephan Schneider, CalTech) Every society faces decisions about where to locate infrastructure that benefits the general public but creates concentrated local costs. This study examines how decentralizing decision-making authority shapes the allocation of critical yet locally contested facilities, focusing on Sweden’s introduction of municipal veto power over onshore wind farms. Using data on all approved and rejected onshore wind farms, we generate site-specific estimates of energy production and local externalities, measured by impacts on individual real estate transaction prices. To assess the consequences of decentralization, we develop a simulation that compares each planned wind farm in Sweden over the past 25 years with every possible alternative site to which developers could have applied. This analysis highlights an inherent trade-off between national efficiency and reducing local externalities. Faced with this trade-off, local politicians with veto rights prioritize their constituents’ interests and are more likely to reject applications that would impose higher costs on local residents. Decentralization reduces local burdens at the expense of national siting efficiency and shifts costs toward neighboring municipalities and socially disadvantaged groups.
Redistributing school resources: Evidence from a funding reform
(with Lisa Laun, IFAU & Lena Hensvik, UU) In this paper, we study whether redistributing school funding toward disadvantaged students improves their educational outcomes. We exploit a reform of Stockholm’s school funding allocation system in 2012, which generated substantial variation in per-student resources across compulsory schools, with clear winners and losers. We first document the pass-through from funding to spending: increased resources raise total expenditures, primarily on personnel, but also on instructional materials and student health services. We find no effects of increased funding on average educational outcomes. However, we find positive effects for groups targeted by the reform, particularly recently arrived immigrants, with effects concentrated among boys. These results suggest that redistributing school resources based on socioeconomic composition can reduce achievement gaps without increasing overall spending.
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
Swedish Women’s Suffrage Petitioners, 1913–14
This repository contains transcribed and harmonized data from the nationwide Swedish petition for women’s political suffrage and eligibility for office in 1913–14.
In September 1921, Sweden held its first parliamentary election in which women and men could both vote and stand for office. The reform followed a long political campaign led by the National Association for Women’s Suffrage in Sweden (NAWS; Landsföreningen för kvinnans politiska rösträtt), which coordinated local suffrage associations across the country. In 1913, NAWS launched a mass petition in which Swedish women demanded political suffrage. Through extensive organizing, the association submitted about 350,000 signatures to the Swedish Parliament in 1914, equivalent to roughly 18 percent of women aged 18 or older in Sweden at the time.
The source material was digitized through I demokratins namn: kvinnorna som krävde rösträtt on FromThePage, using scanned archival volumes from the National Archives of Sweden. The transcriptions come from an ongoing citizen-science project launched in 2022 by Monir Bounadi and Mattias Folkestad, the authors of this harmonized data release, together with Karl-Magnus Johansson at the National Archives of Sweden. About 370 contributors have participated to date. This release is based on the first finalized set of completed transcriptions. The source images and collaborative transcriptions are available here.
Version 0.1 contains 18,733 petition lists and 350,092 petitioners after removing reviewed duplicate scans, blank source pages, and crossed-out or non-person entries.