Essay I: This paper examines the career/family trade-off at labor market entry using unique data on job preferences among Swedish law graduates. Using ranked job applications, I document gender differences in employment and location preferences: women are less geographically mobile and less likely to pursue private-sector career paths. I focus in particular on cohabitation status at labor market entry to investigate how early family ties may constrain preferences. Cohabiting applicants—regardless of gender—are less mobile, reflecting short-run career constraints. However, cohabitation at labor market entry does not predict long-run gender differences in earnings. Instead, career trajectories begin to diverge with the timing of parenthood, underscoring the unequal career costs of family formation.    

Essay II (with Seema Jayachandran, Lea Nassal, Matthew J. Notowidigdo, Marie Paul and Heather Sarsons): Many couples face a trade-off between advancing one spouse’s career or the other’s. We study this trade-off using administrative data from Germany and Sweden and find that when couples move across commuting zones, men’s earnings increase more than women’s. To distinguish between men's greater earnings potential and a gender norm that prioritizes men’s careers, we examine how the patterns differ depending on whether the man or the woman has higher potential earnings. We then estimate a household decision-making model in which households can—and empirically do—place more weight on the man’s income. 

Essay III (with Dana Scott): We investigate whether the expansion of remote work following the COVID-19 pandemic helped mitigate child penalties in Sweden. A household labor supply model predicts that work-from-home opportunities reduce the child penalty only when primarily accessible to mothers, with little effect if both parents have equal access. Consistent with this, our empirical results show that remote work has had limited impact on mothers’ relative earnings, employment, hours, and wages. 

Essay IV (with Daniel Avdic, Arizo Karimi and Anna Sjögren): This paper studies how parental time investments affect children's human capital development. We exploit Sweden’s 1995 parental leave reform in an RD-DD framework and find that, while average GPA effects are limited, the reform reduced school-leaving grades for sons of non-college educated fathers and increased intergenerational skill correlations. We find no support for mental health, fertility, or role model channels. Instead, the results suggest that increased separation risk in disadvantaged families may have reduced paternal time investments.