Following the arrival of the first child, women's absence rates soar and become less predictable due to the greater frequency of their own sickness and the need to care for sick children. In this paper, we argue that this fall in presenteeism in the workplace hurts women's wages, not only...

We study how employee sickness absence affects worker-firm matching. We build on the idea that firms are sensitive to absence in jobs with few substitutes (unique positions). Consistent with this, we show that unique employees are less absent conditional on individual characteristics,...

We study the short- and long-term impact of local enfranchisement of foreign citizens born outside the EU on political integration outcomes. Local voting rights for foreigners were introduced in the Swedish electoral system in 1976. This right to vote is conditional on having spent at least...

Skilled and educated women have on average fewer children and are more likely to remain childless than the less skilled and educated. Using rich Swedish register data, we show that these negative associations found in most previous studies largely disappear if we remove the impact of family...

Voting is a fundamental human right. Yet, individuals that are younger than 18 do typically not have this right since they are considered uninformed. However, recent evidence tentatively suggests that the political knowledge of youths is endogenous to the voting age. I test for the existence of...

Recent experimental evidence suggests that women in general are more discouraged than men by failures which potentially can explain why women, on average, are less likely than men to reach top positions in firms. This paper provides the first quasi-experimental evidence from the field on this...

Students in East-Asian countries consistently score in the top in international assessments. One possible explanation for this success is their use of 'Lesson study' to enhance teaching practices, but evidence on its effectiveness is still scant. We evaluate a national teacher development...

We study the impact of asylum waiting, exploiting a rapid increase in processing times for asylum seekers to Sweden in 2014. Longer waiting slows down the integration process and affects labor market outcomes for an extended period. Accumulated earnings during the first four years after...

Using administrative data from Sweden, I study an internationally unique parental leave policy that rewarded parents with a financial bonus as a function of their division of paid parental leave. Results from a birthdate based regression discontinuity design show that the policy significantly...

Take-up of social benefits is a central issue in poverty alleviation and fiscal evaluations of policy reforms. However, it is difficult t o fi nd exogenous variation in the benefit level, and little is therefore known about takeup responses to basic financial i ncentives. We exploit large and...