An emerging question in demographic economics is whether there is a link between family size and the geographic distance between adult children and elderly parents. Given current population trends, understanding how different configurations of family size and sibship influence patterns of...

This paper provides new evidence on the role of the educational system for intergenerational mobility. I evaluate an educational reform, implemented in Sweden in the 1950s and 60s, which postponed tracking and extended compulsory education from seven to nine years. The reform may have influenced...

When studying different types of returns to education, educational reforms are commonly used in the economics literature as a source of exogenous variation in education. The Swedish compulsory school reform is one example; the reform extended compulsory education throughout the country, in...

There is considerable disagreement in the academic literature about whether raising school expenditure improves educational outcomes. Yet changing the level of resources is one of the key policy levers open to governments. In the UK, school expenditure has increased by about 40 per cent in real...

We review the empirical literature that estimates the causal effect of parent's schooling on child's schooling, and conclude that estimates differ across studies. We then consider three explanations for why this is: (a) idiosyncratic differences in data sets, (b) differences in remaining biases...

Helena Holmlund and Sandra McNally ask whether educational reforms in Sweden really do offer lessons for the UK

This paper studies the causal effect of educational attainment on conviction and incarceration using Sweden's compulsory schooling reform as an instrument for years of schooling and a 25 percent random sample from Sweden's Multigenerational Register matched with more than 30 years of...

An emerging question in demographic economics is whether there is a link between family size and the geographic distance between adult children and elderly parents. Given current population trends, understanding how different configurations of family size and sibship influence patterns of...

We review the empirical literature that estimates the causal effect of parent’s schooling on child’s schooling, and conclude that estimates differ across studies. We then consider three explanations for why this is: (a) idiosyncratic differences in data sets; (b) differences in remaining...

The aim of this study is to estimate the causal effect of family size on the proximity between older mothers and adult children by using a large administrative data set from Sweden. Our main results show that adult children in Sweden are not constrained by sibship size in choosing where to live:...