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 sibling on the educational outcomes of children in migrant and native families. Using exogenous variation in sibling achievement from Sweden’s school-entry cutoff in a Regression Discontinuity Design, I show that second-generation migrant girls face a unique disadvantage. A high-achieving brother lowers their grades, while a high-achieving sister has a small positive influence. Spillover effects are negligible for boys and native children regardless of sibling gender. Heterogeneity analysis suggests that traditional cultural norms contributes to this disadvantage, but parental labor market integration completely offsets it.

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.