We utilize a large-scale randomized social experiment to identify how coworkers affect each other's effort as measured by work absence. The experiment altered the work absence incentives for half of all employees living in Göteborg, Sweden. Using administrative data we are able to recover the...

This paper examines the effect of income inequality on health for a group of particularly disadvantaged individuals: refugees. Our analysis draws on longitudinal hospitalization records coupled with a settlement policy where Swedish authorities assigned newly arrived refugees to their first area...

This paper estimates the effects of early interventions in the Swedish sickness insurance system. The aim of the interventions is to screen and, further to, rehabilitate sick listed individuals. We find that the early interventions - in contrast to what is expected - increase the inflow into...

Abadie and Imbens (2008, Econometrica) showed that classical bootstrap schemes fail to provide correct inference for K-nearest neighbour (KNN) matching estimators of average causal effects. This is an interesting result showing that bootstrap should not be applied without theoretical...

This paper studies the cross-border health and productivity effects of alcohol taxes. We estimate the effect of a large cut in the Finnish alcohol tax on mortality, alcohol related illnesses and work absenteeism in Sweden. This tax cut led to large differences in the prices of alcoholic...

On normal days, the temperature decreases with altitude, allowing air pollutants to rise and disperse. During inversion episodes, a warmer air layer at higher altitude traps pollutants close to the ground. We show how readily available NASA satellite data on vertical temperature profiles can be...

Women are on average more absent from work for health reasons than men. At the same time, they live longer. This conflicting pattern suggests that part of the gender difference in health-related absenteeism arises from differences between the genders unrelated to actual health. An overlooked...

This study investigates possible reasons for the gender difference in sickness absence. We estimate both short- and long-term effects of parenthood in a within-couple analysis based on the timing of parenthood. We find that after entering parenthood, women increase their sickness absence by...

This paper studies gender differences in the extent to which social preferences affect workers' shirking decisions. Using exogenous variation in work absence induced by a randomized field experiment that increased treated workers' absence, we find that also non-treated workers increased their...