This paper studies the causal effect of the timing of first birth on highly educated women’s career outcomes using exogenous variation in first birth timing induced by the occurrence of pregnancy loss before first birth. Contrasting previous findings, my results suggest that a one-year delay...

This paper analyzes the consequences of the spacing of births for women’s subsequent labor income and wages. Spacing births in longer intervals may allow women to re-enter the labor market between childbearing events, thereby avoiding expanded work interruptions and, in turn, reducing the...

More children than ever attend center-based care early in life. We study whether children who attend center-based care before age 3 have better or worse language and motor skills, socio-emotional maturity, and school readiness just before entering primary school. In data covering about 36,000...

We study how the duration of paid parental leave affects the accumulation of cognitive skills among children. We use a reform which extended parental leave benefits from 12 to 15 months for Swedish children born after August 1988 to evaluate the effects of prolonged parental leave on...

This paper studies effects of education policy on early fertility. We study a major educational reform in Sweden in which vocational tracks in upper secondary school were prolonged from two to three years and the curricula were made more academic. Our identification strategy takes advantage of...

We study the intergenerational transmission of cognitive and non-cognitive abilities between parents and sons using population-wide enlistment data. Conscripts are eva-luated at the same age and with comparable methods across cohorts, and we correct for measurement error bias in fathers’...

This paper evaluates how access to paid parental leave affects labor market entrance for immigrating mothers with small children. Paid parental leave together with job protection may increase labor force participation among women but if it is too generous it may create incentives to stay out of...

Women account for the majority of parental leave take-up, which is likely one of the major reasons for the gender gap in income and wages. Consequently, many countries exert effort to promote a more gender equal division of parental leave. Indeed, the last decades have seen an increase in...

Earnings in mid-career and children are two fundamental outcomes of the life-choices of men and women. Both require time and other resources and reflect the accumulated priorities of individuals and couples. We explore how these outcomes have changed for Swedish men and women born 1945-1962 by...

This paper examines the time profile of the effect of fertility on female labour earnings with respect to time since birth. To address endogeneity of fertility to labour income, we use the same-sex instrument (Angrist and Evans, 1998) in a novel way on a panel data set to uncover the time...