Boards hire and fire CEOs based on imperfect information. Using comprehensive data on 28 cohorts in Sweden, we analyze the role of a potentially important unobserved attribute - CEO health - in corporate governance. We find CEOs are significantly healthier than the population and other highskill...

This paper examines the long-term effects of early sports selection using a regression discontinuity design. I show that Swedish track and field athletes who qualified for a one-time appearance with the junior national team at age 17 are less likely to quit sports and more likely to improve...

A recurring theme in evaluations of Swedish residential youth care is that treatment is often unplanned. In this paper, I show that planned treatment is strongly positively associated with treatment outcomes. In the short term, teenagers with planned treatment are less likely to experience a...

Theoretically, there are several reasons to expect education to have a positive effect on health and empirical research suggests that education can be an important health determinant. However, it has not yet been established whether education and health are indeed causally related, and the...

The high and rapidly increasing prevalence of mental illnesses underscores the importance of understanding their causal origins. This paper analyzes one factor at a critical stage of human development: exposure to maternal stress from family ruptures during the fetal period. We find that in...

We use administrative data on Swedish lottery players to estimate the causal impact of wealth on players' own health and their children's health and developmental outcomes. Our estimation sample is large,virtually free of attrition, and allows us to control for the factors - such as the number...

This paper presents evidence that generalized trust promotes health. Children of immigrants in a broad set of European countries with ancestry from across the world are studied. Individuals are examined within country of residence using variation in trust across countries of ancestry. The...

This paper investigates the intergenerational transmission of health in the very long run. Using a unique purpose-built administrative dataset on individuals born in Sweden between 1930-34 and their parents, we study the intergenerational transmission (IGT) of health and the impact of previous...

Health assessments correlate with health outcomes and subjective well-being. Immigrants offer an opportunity to study persistent social influences on health where the social conditions are not endogenous to individual outcomes. This approach provides a clear direction of causality from social...

This paper studies the effect of the 1918-19 influenza pandemic on fertility using a historical dataset from Sweden. Our results suggest an immediate reduction in fertility driven by morbidity, and additional behavioral effects driven by mortality. We find some evidence of community rebuilding...