A selection from Stockholm University publication database

• Birth Weight in the Long Run

  2018. Prashant Bharadwaj, Petter Lundborg, Dan-Olof Rooth. The Journal of human resources 53 (1), 189-231

  Article

  We study the effect of birth weight on long-run outcomes using data on Swedish twins born between 1926 and 1958 linked to administrative records spanning entire life-time labor market histories. We find that birth weight positively affects permanent income and income across large parts of the lifecycle. The timing of the birth weight–income relationship is in line with the role of birth weight in determining takeup of sickness benefits and morbidity. The effect of birth weight on labor market outcomes even for cohorts born 30 years apart are similar; for short run health outcomes, birth weight plays a decreasing role over time.

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• Neighborhood signaling effects, commuting time, and employment

  2018. Magnus Carlsson, Abdulaziz Abrar Reshid, Dan-Olof Rooth. International journal of manpower 39 (4), 534-549

  Article

  Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether there is unequal treatment in hiring depending on whether a job applicant signals living in a bad (deprived) neighborhood or in a good (affluent) neighborhood.

  Design/methodology/approach - The authors conducted a field experiment where fictitious job applications were sent to employers with an advertised vacancy. Each job application was randomly assigned a residential address in either a bad or a good neighborhood. The measured outcome is the fraction of invitations for a job interview (the callback rate).

  Findings - The authors find no evidence of general neighborhood signaling effects. However, job applicants with a foreign background have callback rates that are 42 percent lower if they signal living in a bad neighborhood rather than in a good neighborhood. In addition, the authors find that applicants with commuting times longer than 90 minutes have lower callback rates, and this is unrelated to the neighborhood signaling effect.

  Originality/value - Empirical evidence of causal neighborhood effects on labor market outcomes is scant, and causal evidence on the mechanisms involved is even more scant. The paper provides such evidence.

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• The intergenerational transmission of human capital

  2018. Petter Lundborg, Martin Nordin, Dan Olof Rooth. Journal of Population Economics 31 (4), 1035-1065

  Article

  We provide new evidence on some of the mechanisms reflected in the intergenerational transmission of human capital. Applying both an adoption and a twin design to rich data from the Swedish military enlistment, we show that greater parental education increases sons' cognitive and non-cognitive skills, as well as their health. The estimates are in many cases similar across research designs and suggest that a substantial part of the effect of parental education on their young adult children's human capital works through improving their skills and health.

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• Family Spillovers in Field of Study

  2020. Gordon B. Dahl, Dan-Olof Rooth, Anders Stenberg.

  Report

  This paper estimates peer effects both from older to younger siblings and from parents to children in academic fields of study. Our setting is secondary school in Sweden, where admissions to oversubscribed fields is determined based on a student's GPA. Using an RD design, we find strong spillovers in field choices that depend on the gender mix of siblings and whether the field is gender conforming. There are also large intergenerational effects from fathers and mothers to sons, except in female-dominated fields, but little effect for daughters. These spillovers have long-term consequences for occupational segregation and wage gaps by gender.

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• Long-Run Returns to Field of Study in Secondary School

  2020. Gordon B. Dahl, Dan-Olof Rooth, Anders Stenberg.

  Report

  This paper studies whether specialized academic fields of study in secondary school, which are common in many countries, affect earnings as an adult. Identification is challenging, because it requires not just quasi-random variation into fields of study, but also an accounting of individuals’ next-best alternatives. Our setting is Sweden, where at the end of ninth grade students rank fields of study and admissions to oversubscribed fields is determined based on a student’s GPA. We use a regression discontinuity design which allows for different labor market returns for each combination of preferred versus next-best choice, together with nationwide register data for school cohorts from 1977-1991 linked to their earnings as adults. Our analysis yields four main findings. First, Engineering, Natural Science, and Business yield higher earnings relative to most second-best choices, while Social Science and Humanities result in sizable drops, even relative to non-academic vocational programs. Second, the return to completing a field varies substantially as a function of a student’s next-best alternative. The magnitudes are often as large as estimates of the return to two years of additional education. Third, the pattern of returns for individuals with different first and second best choices is consistent with comparative advantage for many field choice combinations, while others exhibit either random sorting or comparative disadvantage. Fourth, most of the differences in adult earnings can be attributed to differences in college major and occupation. Taken together, these results highlight that the field choices students make at age 16, when they may have limited information about their skills and the labor market, have effects which last into adulthood.

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• Long-Term Effects of Childhood Nutrition: Evidence from a School Lunch Reform

  2022. Petter Lundborg, Dan-Olof Rooth, Jesper Alex-Petersen. The Review of Economic Studies 89 (2), 876-908

  Article

  We study the long-term impact of a policy-driven change in childhood nutrition. For this purpose, we evaluate a program that rolled out nutritious school lunches free of charge to all pupils in Swedish primary schools between 1959 and 1969. We estimate the impact of the program on children’s economic, educational, and health outcomes throughout life. Our results show that the school lunch program generated substantial long-term benefits, where pupils exposed to the program during their entire primary school period have 3% higher lifetime income. The effect was greater for pupils that were exposed at earlier ages and for pupils from poor households, suggesting that the program reduced socioeconomic inequalities in adulthood. Exposure to the program also had substantial effects on educational attainment and health, which can explain a large part of the effect of the program on lifetime income.

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• The Effect of Nutritious School Lunches on Education, Health, and Life-Time Income

  2022. Petter Lundborg, Dan-Olof Rooth. CESifo Forum 23 (1), 52-56

  Article

  In this article we present the long-run gains of adopting a nutritious school meal program for Swedish children. During the 1960s, Sweden rolled out a universal program that provided nutritious school lunches free of charge to all children in Swedish primary schools. Our results show that the school lunch program generated substantial long-term benefits, where pupils exposed to the program during their entire primary school period have 3 percent greater life-time earnings. This effect was greater for pupils from poor households, suggesting that the program reduced socioeconomic inequalities in adulthood. Exposure to the school lunch program also had substantial effects on educational attainment and health.

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• Backlash in policy attitudes after the election of an extreme political party

  2021. Magnus Carlsson, Gordon B. Dahl, Dan-Olof Rooth. Journal of Public Economics 204

  Article

  This paper studies how public attitudes towards reduced immigration, the signature policy of the far right Sweden Democrats, respond once the party increases their political representation at the local level. To identify causal effects, we use panel data from 290 municipal election districts and compare otherwise similar elections where the Sweden Democrats either barely win or lose an additional seat. We estimate that a one seat increase for this far-right, anti-immigration party decreases negative attitudes towards immigration by 1.8 or 4.1 percentage points (depending on which national survey we use), contrary to the party's policy position. Consistent with these attitudinal changes, we find suggestive evidence the Sweden Democrats lose the incumbency advantage experienced by other small parties in Sweden. Exploring possible mechanisms, we find evidence for higher politician turnover and a rise in negative newspaper coverage. These findings demonstrate that political representation can cause an attitudinal backlash as a fringe party and their ideas are placed under closer scrutiny.

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• Does Integration Change Gender Attitudes? The Effect of Randomly Assigning Women to Traditionally Male Teams

  2021. Gordon B. Dahl, Andreas Kotsadam, Dan-Olof Rooth. Quarterly Journal of Economics 136 (2), 987-1030

  Article

  We examine whether integrating men and women in a traditionally male-dominated environment can change men's 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 boot camp. We find that living and working with women for eight weeks causes men to have more egalitarian attitudes. There is a 14 percentage point higher fraction of men who think mixed-gender teams perform as well or better than same-gender teams, an 8 percentage point increase in men who think household work should be shared equally, and a 14 percentage point increase in men who do not completely disavow feminine traits. Moreover, men in mixed-gender teams are more likely to choose military occupations immediately after boot camp that have a higher fraction of women in them. But these effects do not persist once treatment stops. Treated men’s attitudes converge to those of the controls in a six-month follow-up survey, and there is no long-term effect on choosing fields of study, occupations, or workplaces with a higher fraction of women after military service ends. Contrary to the predictions of many policy makers, we do not find that integrating women into squads hurt male recruits’ performance or satisfaction with service, either during boot camp or their subsequent military assignment. These findings provide evidence that even in a highly gender-skewed environment, gender stereotypes are malleable and can be altered by integrating members of the opposite sex. But they also suggest that without continuing intensive exposure, effects are unlikely to persist.

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• Birth weight and vulnerability to a macroeconomic crisis

  2019. Prashant Bharadwaj (et al.). Journal of Health Economics 66, 136-144

  Article

  This paper shows that early-life health is an important determinant of labor market vulnerability during macroeconomic downturns. Using data on twins during Sweden's crisis of the early 1990s, we show that individuals with higher birth weight are differentially less likely to receive unemployment insurance benefits after the crisis as compared to before it, and that this effect is concentrated among workers in the private sector. While differences in early-life health thus lead to increased inequality in employment outcomes, we also find that there is no differential effect of birth weight on total income after the crisis. This suggests that in the context of Sweden, the social safety net is able to mitigate the effects of early-life health on labor market outcomes during economic downturns. 

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• Does integration change gender attitudes? The effect of randomly assigning women to traditionally male teams

  2018. Gordon B. Dahl, Andreas Kotsadam, Dan-Olof Rooth.

  Report

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• Job Search Methods and Wages: Are Natives and Immigrants Different?

  2018. Magnus Carlsson, Stefan Eriksson, Dan-Olof Rooth. Manchester School 86 (2), 219-247

  Article

  We conduct a survey of newly hired workers in the Swedish labour market to analyse if there are differences between natives and immigrants in the choice of search intensity/methods and in the search method getting the job. We further investigate if the wage and other characteristics of the new job differ depending on the successful search method. We find that immigrants use all search methods more than natives, but they especially rely on informal search. Immigrants are more likely than natives to find a job using informal search through friends and relatives, and these jobs are associated with lower wages.

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• Long-term effects of childhood nutrition: evidence from a school lunch reform

  2018. Jesper Alex-Petersen, Petter Lundborg, Dan-Olof Rooth.

  Report

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• The health-schooling relationship: evidence from Swedish twins

  2016. Petter Lundborg, Anton Nilsson, Dan-Olof Rooth. Journal of Population Economics 29 (4), 1191-1215

  Article

  Health and education are known to be highly correlated, but the mechanisms behind the relationship are not well understood. In particular, there is sparse evidence on whether adolescent health may influence educational attainment. Using a large registry dataset of twins, including comprehensive information on health status at the age of 18 and later educational attainment, we investigate whether health predicts final education within monozygotic (identical) twin pairs. We find no evidence of this and conclude that health in adolescence may not have an influence on the level of schooling. Instead, raw correlations between adolescent health and schooling appear to be driven by genes and twin-pair-specific environmental factors.

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Show all publications by Dan-Olof Rooth at Stockholm University