How schooling affects cognitive skills is a fundamental question for studies of human capital and labor markets. While scores on cognitive ability tests are positively associated with schooling, it has proven difficult to ascertain whether this relationship is causal. Moreover, the effect of...

We examine whether exposure of men to women in a traditionally male-dominated environment can change attitudes about mixed-gender productivity, gender roles and gender identity. Our context is the military in Norway, where we randomly assigned female recruits to some squads but not others during...

We study the effect of birth weight on long-run outcomes, including permanent income, income across various stages of the lifecycle, education, social benefits take-up, and adult mortality. For this purpose, we have linked a unique dataset on nearly all Swedish twins born between 1926- 1958,...

This paper shows that health is an important determinant of labor market vulnerability during large economic crises. Using data on adults during Sweden's unexpected economic crisis in the early 1990s, we show that early and later life health are important determinants of job loss after the...

Far-right and far-left parties by definition occupy the fringes of politics, with policy proposals outside the mainstream. This paper asks how public attitudes about such policies respond once an extreme party increases their political representation at the local level. We study attitudes...

This paper estimates peer effects both from parents to children and from older to younger siblings in academic fields of study in high school. Despite the importance of family peer effects, causal evidence is scarce due to correlated unobservables and a lack of data. Our setting is Sweden, where...

This paper studies whether specialized academic fields of study in secondary school (i.e., high school majors), which are common in many countries, affect earnings as an adult. Identification is challenging, because it requires not just quasi-random variation into majors, but also an accounting...