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Previous research from the U.S. has suggested that black-white interaction in school can reduce prejudice and increase the prevalence of interracial relationships. We test whether this result holds also for natives and immi-grants in Europe - groups whose interaction is plausibly more constrained by religious and cultural differences. Specifically, we study whether exposure to immigrant origin peers in school affects natives' probability to have a child with a partner with non-Western background. Identification is based on variation in immigrant exposure across cohorts within schools in Sweden. We find that natives are affected by exposure to opposite-sex peers: native girls (boys) are more likely to have a child with a partner with non-Western background when exposed to immigrant origin boys (girls). In contrast to previous studies, we find no effects from same-sex peer exposure.

This work investigates to what extent assortative mating contributes to intergenerational earnings persistence. I use an errors-in-variables model to demonstrate how pooling of partners' "potential" earnings affects intergenerational earnings persistence, and I simulate persistence under different assumptions about assortative mating and women's earnings distribution. Using Swedish data on cohorts born 1945-1965 and rank-based measures, I show that a substantial decline in marital sorting has contributed little to lowering intergenerational persistence. The intergenerational elasticity (IGE) is, however, more sensitive to sorting, in particular for women. Overall, variations in marital sorting must be large to affect intergenerational mobility to a great extent. Instead, the relative earnings distributions of men and women, in combination with sorting, are important for intergenerational persistence.

This paper studies the effects of school organisation on pupils’ school environment, travel patterns and educational outcomes, exploiting a policy change that reorganised Swedish middle school education. The reorganisation induced pupils to remain in small local schools throughout grades 1–9, as opposed to making a transition to large middle schools between grades 6 and 7. The reorganisation had large consequences for pupils’ environments in the affected areas: travel distances to school decreased as well as the school cohort size; the composition of peers became more homogenous; and notably we find a reduction in teacher qualifications and experience. Despite that the previous literature has found that school transitions, school size and teacher experience are important inputs in the education production function, we find no evidence that remaining in a small local school had effects on educational outcomes. We reconcile our evidence using a survey which reveals that Swedish pupils do not perceive large differences in the psychosocial learning environment between schools of different grade configurations. Our results are important in informing policy makers and urban planners of the costs and benefits of different types of school organisations.

We study an education intervention targeting underachieving pupils' noncognitive skills with the aim of improving attendance and cognitive outcomes. We evaluate the policy effect on test scores in national exams at age 16 exploiting repeated observations to control for unobservables. We find little evidence of improved cognitive outcomes. We further examine the policy impact on students' absences. Lacking repeated observations on this outcome, we simulate the effect of unobservables on attendance. While the intervention had beneficial effects on school presence, these did not translate to improved cognitive outcomes. Conversely, the policy generated positive spillover effects on nontreated students' test scores.