When parents prioritize investments in sons over daughters, this gender bias can render otherwise beneficial educational policies ineffective for girls or even lead to unintended negative consequences. This study examines how Sweden's school entry policy interacts with family structure to shape the educational outcomes of second-generation migrant girls. Using a regression discontinuity design on high-quality administrative data, I first assess the direct effects of late school entry, showing that it benefits migrant girls with younger sisters but not those with younger brothers. Furthermore, by investigating sibling spillover effects from an older sibling's late school entry, I demonstrate that spending more time at home with an older brother who enters school late has a strong negative effect on the educational outcomes of younger sisters. I propose a simple theory to explain these results, highlighting gender bias in parental preferences as a key factor. Supporting this interpretation, I present evidence showing that these negative impacts are specific to migrant girls, with neither migrant boys nor native children experiencing similar effects. Moreover, the effects are more pronounced in migrant families with traditional backgrounds and are also reflected in mothers' labor supply decisions when sons, rather than daughters, enter school late.

Custody arrangements are crucial in determining how frequently and in what way children interact with each parent after a divorce, because these potentially translate to investments in children by both parents. This paper explores the causal effects of joint versus sole custody on children's and parents' outcomes. We merge hand-collected data on more than 100,000 custody cases with several registries from Statistics Sweden to create a comprehensive administrative data set containing various child and parental outcomes measures. To identify the casual effects of joint versus sole custody, we leverage the random assignment of custody cases to judges, along with systematic differences in judges' preferences for joint versus sole custody. We demonstrate that pre-determined characteristics of parents and children are uncorrelated with the preferences of the judge handling their case, whereas judges' preferences are highly predictive of the custody ruling in individual cases. Preliminary findings from the paper indicate that shared custody (i) has significant positive effects on children's educational outcomes, (ii) increases fathers' labor market attachment and earnings, and (iii) shows no significant impact on mothers' labor market outcomes.

This paper examines how linguistic distance between host and origin languages influences the gender gap in migrant children's education. Linguistic distance highlights an overlooked factor: girls’ advantage in early language learning. Using cross-country PISA data and an epidemiological approach, I find that greater linguistic distance improves language scores for first-generation migrant girls, with no effect on math scores. In contrast, using the more standard measure of cultural proximity in gender norms does not alter the gender gap for first-generation migrants but significantly disadvantages second-generation migrant girls in math. These findings show that while both linguistic distance and cultural gender norms reflect cultural proximity, they affect the academic gender gap of first- and second-generation migrant children differently.