Research

Academic inequality between migrants and natives is often attributed to family dynamics that are difficult to observe. Siblings provide a way to study them: I estimate the effect of having a high-achieving older sibling on the educational outcomes of children in migrant and native families. Exploiting exogenous variation in sibling achievement generated by Sweden’s school-entry cutoffs in a regression discontinuity design, I show that having a high-achieving brother has a negative effect on second-generation migrant girls, whereas having a high-achieving sister has a small positive effect. No such heterogeneity by sibling gender appears for second-generation migrant boys or native children. I propose a simple theory highlighting gender-biased parental preferences. Consistent with this mechanism, the effects are more pronounced in migrant families with traditional backgrounds and are reflected in mothers’ labor supply responses when sons, rather than daughters, are high-achievers.

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 show that the gender gap in reading and math test scores widens in favor of girls among fifteen-year-old migrants from countries with less similar languages to the host country. Linguistic distance does not have an impact on the gender gap for second-generation migrants born in the host country. In contrast, cultural proximity in gender norms poses a significant disadvantage for second-generation migrant girls in terms of both reading and math scores. While distances in linguistic and cultural gender norms both reflect cultural proximity, they affect the academic gender gap of first- and second-generation migrant children differently.