This paper uses exceptionally rich data on Swedish corporate executives and their personal characteristics to study gender gaps in CEO appointments and pay. Both gaps are sizeable: 18% for CEO appointments and 27% for pay. At most one-eight of the gaps can be attributed to observable gender...

We use exceptionally rich data on all business, economics, and engineering graduates in Sweden to study women's career progression and its causes. A wide range of observables do not explain the lack of women in top executive positions. Instead, slow career progression in the five years after the...

This paper examines whether recent advancements in automation and robotics have affected intergenerational income mobility. Using detailed data on all individuals and firms registered in Sweden, we study whether parental exposure to robots at the occupational level and heterogeneous adoption of...

A large and growing empirical literature has presented evidence of job polarization, i.e. the simultaneous growth of high-wage jobs and low-wage jobs at the expense of middle-wage jobs. Thus far, the focus has been on employment in different occupations, without taking into account the role of...

This paper empirically tests the hypothesis that landed elites may block technological change and economic development if they fear that they will lose future political power (Acemoglu and Robinson (2002, 2006, and 2012). It exploits a plausible exogenous change in the distribution of political...

In this paper, we study foreign ownership as a vehicle for transferring gender norms across international borders. Specifically, we analyze how the wage differential between men and women in Swedish firms is affected by the degree of gender inequality in the home country of foreign investors....

We examine the relationship between occupational automation probabilities and employment dynamics over nearly two decades. We show that employment and wage shares of occupations with a higher automation risk have declined in Sweden over the period 1996-2013. This has occurred both in the...

We document a significant increase in the sorting of workers by cognitive and non-cognitive skills across Swedish firms between 1986 and 2008. The weight of the evidence suggests that the increase in sorting is due to stronger complementarities between worker skills and technology. In...

Recently, policy makers worldwide have suggested and passed legislation to ban mobile phone use in schools. The influential and only quantitative evaluation by Beland and Murphy (2016), suggests that this is a very low-cost but effective policy to improve student performance. In particular, it...

Individuals with ancestry from countries with advanced information technology in 1500 AD, such as movable type and paper, adopt the internet faster than those with less advanced ancestry. The analysis illustrates persistence over five centuries in information technology adoption in European and...