Education policy holds the promise of breaking the strong ties between family background and socio-economic position by providing publicly accessible education for children of all backgrounds. However, the education system may also perpetuate social inequalities if well-off families are able to...

This paper investigates to what extent assortative mating contributes to intergenerational earnings persistence. I use an errors-in-variables model to demonstrate how pooling of partners' "potential" earnings affects intergenerational earnings persistence, and simulate persistence under...

This paper demonstrates how a natural experiment in education can be used to estimate causal effects. The Swedish compulsory school reform extended basic education gradually across cohorts and municipalities, allowing for a difference-in-differences analysis. The paper summarizes the literature...

This paper documents that a shift from a selective to a comprehensive education system had implications for marriage market outcomes. By exploiting an education reform in Sweden, I show that comprehensive education reduced assortative mating both because children from poor backgrounds started to...

Equality of opportunity has been one of the central ideas governing education policy in the Nordic welfare state. This paper takes its starting point in the shared history of educational reform in the Nordic countries, and presents evidence that the comprehensive school reforms that implied a...