About me

I am a professor of Economics at SOFI, Stockholm University. My research interests include labor economics, intergenerational mobility, entrepreneurship, social networks and crime.

Teaching

Labor III: Human Capital and the Economics of Education

Research

Works in Progress

Crime Policy and Networks (with Yves Zenou), January 2019.

• This new article illustrates how tools from social network analysis can be used to provide practical guidance for the design of crime prevention policies.

Publications

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

• Article Rich Dad, Smart Dad
  2012. Lars Lefgren, Matthew J. Lindquist, David Sims. Journal of Political Economy 120 (2), 268-303

  We construct a simple model, consistent with Becker and Tomes, that decomposes the intergenerational income elasticity into the causal effect of financial resources, the mechanistic transmission of human capital, and the role that human capital plays in the determination of fathers' permanent incomes. We show how a particular set of instrumental variables could separately identify the money and human capital transmission effects. Using data from a 35 percent sample of Swedish sons and their fathers, we show that only a minority of the intergenerational income elasticity can be plausibly attributed to the causal effect of fathers' financial resources.

• Article The Effect of Education on Criminal Convictions and Incarceration
  2015. Randi Hjalmarsson, Helena Holmlund, Matthew J. Lindquist. Economic Journal 125 (587), 1290-1326

  This article 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 70% sample from Sweden's Multigenerational Register matched with more than 30years of administrative crime records. We find a significant negative effect of schooling on male convictions and incarceration; one additional year of schooling decreases the likelihood of conviction by 6.7% and incarceration by 15.5%. Though OLS estimates for females are of a similar magnitude to those for males, we find no evidence of a significant causal effect for women.

• Article Why Do Entrepreneurial Parents Have Entrepreneurial Children?
  2015. Matthew J. Lindquist, Joeri Sol, Mirjam Van Praag. Journal of Labor Economics 33 (2), 269-296

  We explore the origins of the intergenerational association in entrepreneurship using Swedish adoption data that allow us to quantify the relative importance of prebirth and postbirth factors. We find that parental entrepreneurship increases the probability of children's entrepreneurship by about 60%. For adoptees, both biological and adoptive parents make significant contributions to this association. These contributions, however, are quite different in size. Postbirth factors account for twice as much as prebirth factors in our decomposition of the intergenerational association in entrepreneurship. We investigate several candidate explanations for this large postbirth factor and present suggestive evidence in favor of role modeling.

Show all publications by Matthew Lindquist at Stockholm University