Hans Grönqvist
Assistant Professor of Economics
Swedish Institute for Social Research (SOFI)
Stockholm University
SE-10691 Stockholm
SWEDEN

Phone: +46 (0)8 16 24 98
Fax: +46 8 154670
E-mail: hans.gronqvist@sofi.su.se

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Short bio

Hans is Assistant Professor of Economics at SOFI. He holds a Ph.D. from Uppsala University (2009) and his dissertation recieved an honorable mention in the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research's Annual Dissertation Award. He has spent time as a vistor at Harvard University and University College London. His current research mainly concerns (i) the causes and consequences of criminal behavior, (ii) how individual time preferences predict economic behavior, (iv) how neighborhoods and peers influence individual outcomes, (iv) the economic analysis of issues related to fertility. More information can be found in his CV.

Research fields

• Labor economics
• Economics of crime
• Public policy

Publications in refereed journals

• "Education Policy and Early Fertility: Lessons from an Expansion of Upper Secondary Education", Economics of Education Review (accepted for publication subject to minor revisions), with Caroline Hall

This paper studies a major reform in Sweden in which vocational tracks in upper secondary school were prolonged from two to three years and the curricula were made more academic. Our identification strategy takes advantage of cross-regional and cross-time variation in the implementation of a pilot scheme in which several municipalities evaluated the new policy. Women who enrolled in the new program were significantly less likely to give birth early in life and that this effect is driven by women with higher opportunity costs of child rearing. There is however no statistically significant effect on men’s fertility decisions.


• “Income Inequality and Health: Lessons from a Refugee Residential Assignment Program", Journal of Health Economics 2012, 31(4), pp. 617– 629, with Per Johansson and Susan Niknami
  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 of residence. The policy was implemented in a way that provides a source of plausibly random variation in initial location. The results reveal no statistically significant effect of income inequality on the risk of being hospitalized. This finding holds also for most population subgroups and when separating between different types of diagnoses. Our estimates are precise enough to rule out large effects of income inequality on health.
  
  
• "Peers, Neighborhoods and Immigrant Student Achievement: Evidence from a Placement Policy", American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 2011, 3(2), pp. 67-95, with Per-Anders Edin, Peter Fredriksson and Olof Åslund

Immigrants typically perform worse than other students in the OECD countries. We examine to what extent this is due to the population characteristics of the neighborhoods that immigrants grow up in. We address this issue using a governmental refugee place­ment policy which provides exogenous variation in the initial place of residence in Sweden. The main result is that, for a given share of immigrants in a neighborhood, immigrant school performance is increasing in the number of highly educated adults sharing the subject’s ethnicity. A standard deviation increase in the fraction of highly educated adults in the assigned neighborhood increases compulsory school GPA by 0.9 percentile ranks. This magnitude corresponds to a tenth of the gap in student per­formance between refugee immigrant and native-born children. We also provide tenta­tive evidence that the overall share of immigrants in the neighborhood has a negative effect on GPA.


• "Family Size and Child Outcomes: Is There Really no Trade-Off?" , Labour Economics, 2009,17(1), pp. 130-139, with Olof Åslund
  Recent empirical work questions the negative relationship between family size and children’s attainments proposed by theoretical work and supported by a large empirical literature. We use twin births as an exogenous source of variation in family size in an unusually rich dataset where it is possible to separately look at intermediate and long-run outcomes. We find little evidence of a causal effect on long-term outcomes such as years of schooling and earnings, and studies that do not take selection effects into account are likely to overstate the effects. We do, however, find a small but significant negative impact of family size on grades in compulsory and secondary school.
  
  
• "Ethnic Enclaves and the Attainments of Immigrant Children", European Sociological Review, 2006, vol 22, no. 4. pp. 369-382.

Although several recent studies have provided important insights into how ethnic enclaves affect immigrants’ socioeconomic outcomes, few have explored this question from the point of view of immigrant children. This paper contributes to the existing literature by investigating the long-term consequences of growing up in an enclave for immigrants’ educational attainments and earnings. The main finding is that the size of the enclave negatively affects the probability of graduating from higher education. I do not, however, find any evidence that enclaves affect earnings.



Working papers and papers submitted to a journal

• “Time Preferences and Lifetime Outcomes” , with Bart Golsteyn and Lena Lindahl, IZA Discussion Paper 7165 (Revised and resubmitted to Economic Journal )

This paper investigates the relationship between time preferences and lifetime social and economic behavior. We use a Swedish longitudinal dataset that links information from a large survey on children’s time preferences at age 13 to administrative registers spanning over five decades. Our results indicate a substantial adverse relationship between high discount rates and school performance, health, labor supply, and lifetime income. Males and high ability children gain significantly more from being future-oriented. These discrepancies are largest regarding outcomes later in life. We also show that the relationship between time preferences and long-run outcomes operates through early human capital investments.


• Youth Unemployment and Crime: Lessons from Longitudinal Population Records (2013) . An earlier version of the paper appeared as SOFI Working-paper No. 7/2011, (Revision requested by Journal of Labor Economics )

This paper uses population wide longitudinal labor market and conviction data to examine the link between youth unemployment and crime. The results suggest large and precisely estimated effects of unemployment on crime. The magnitude of the relationship is stronger for groups of individuals with higher opportunity costs of criminal activity. The evidence shows that the aggregated measures of labor market opportunities used in most previous studies, and general equilibrium, effects may mask the behavioral effect of interest. Contrary to predictions by economic theory, the link between unemployment on crime is not fully mediated by income. Instead, several pieces of evidence suggest that unemployment increases the time and opportunities that individuals have to engage in crime.


• "Putting Teenagers on the Pill: The Consequences of Subsidized Contraception", SOFI Working paper 2012:9 (submited). An earlier version of the paper that include details on long term socioeconomic outcomes appeared as IFAU Working Paper 2009:8
. This paper investigates the consequences of a series of Swedish policy changes in which several regions in the 90s introduced heavily subsidized oral contraception for teenagers. The results reveal that access to the subsidy significantly increased the use of the pill as well as reduced the abortion and teenage birth rate. The decline in teenage births was especially strong among financially constrained youths. The estimates are precise enough to rule out even moderate effects on the birth weight of the children to the exposed mothers. Despite the documented improvements in women’s outcomes, the analysis reveals that the monetary costs of the subsidy substantially exceed its measurable social benefits.


• "Alcohol Availability and Crime: Lessons from Liberalized Weekend Sales Restrictions", with Susan Niknami, SOFI Working-paper No. 9/2011 (Revision requested by Journal of Urban Economics)

We evaluate the impact on alcohol sales and crime of a large scale experimental scheme in which all state monopoly alcohol stores in selected Swedish areas kept open on Saturdays. Relying on cross-regional, cross-time and cross-age variation in access to the experiment we show that it significantly raised both alcohol sales and violent crime. The increase in crime is stronger for segments of the population with low ability and previous convictions. Our back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that the state revenues from the policy exceed the cost of additional crime.


• "Segregation and Health: Evidence from a Settlement Policy", chapter included in doctoral thesis, manuscript currently being redrafted

Publications in non-refereed journals and governmental reports

• "Nyanlända utrikes födda på och utanför arbetsmarknaden”, Report for the Swedish Ministry of Labour, Bilaga 2 included in SOU 2012:69 Med rätt att delta: nyanlända kvinnor och anhöriginvandrare på arbetsmarknaden, with Susan Niknami
• "De långsiktiga konsekvenserna av att växa upp i ett segregerat område", Arbetsmarknad & Arbetsliv , 2006, vol. 12, no. 3, pp. 161-169.
• "Är familjestorlek egentligen något att bry sig om?", Ekonomisk Debatt , 2007, vol 35, no. 8, with Olof Åslund. Also published as IFAU-rapport 2007:13
• "Bör p-piller subventioneras? Konsekvenser för barnafödande, utbildning och arbetsmarknad", Ekonomisk Debatt, 2009, no. 6, pp. 18-26. Also published as IFAU-rapport 2009:6
• Sambandet mellan utbildning och tidigt barnafödande, Ekonomisk Debatt, 2012, no. 3, pp 26-36. Also published as IFAU-rapport 2011:23, with Caroline Hall
• ”Hur påverkar bostadssegregationen flyktingbarns skolresultat?”, Søkelys på arbeidslivet, 2009, årgang 26, sid. 379-389 with Per-Anders Edin, Peter Fredriksson and Olof Åslund. Also published as IFAU-rapport 2009:18
• "“Inkomstskillnader och hälsa: Lärdomar från den svenska utplaceringspolitiken”, Ekonomisk Debatt, 2012, no 6, Also as IFAU-rapport 2012, with Per Johansson and Susan Niknami

In progress

• “Education and Criminal Behavior: Insights from an Expansion of Secondary School”, with Olof Åslund. Caroline Hall and Jonas Vlachos, Manuscript April 2013
  We study the impact on criminal convictions from a large scale Swedish reform of vocational upper secondary education, extending programs from two to three years and adding more general theoretical content. The reform directly concerns age groups where criminal activity is high and students who are overrepresented among criminal offenders. The nature of the reform and the rich administrative data allows us to shed light on several behavioral mechanisms. Our results show that increased access to prolonged and more theoretical education for disadvantaged students leads to a persistent reduction in property crime, but no significant decrease in violent crime. The effect is mainly concentrated to the third year in school which suggests that education reduces the opportunities that individuals have to commit crime.
  
  
• "Lead and Crime: Lessons from the Swedish Phase-out of Leaded Gasoline", Manuscript April 2013, with Peter Nilsson and Per-Olof Robling

This paper examines the effect of childhood lead exposure on crime. Our analysis makes use of population wide administrative data containing information on criminal convictions and individual background characteristics. We are able to follow each subject for a period stretching more than twenty years and observe criminal behavior at the peak of the age-crime profile. We make use of spatial and temporal variation in childhood lead exposure at levels below the current government safety limits. We find that the reduction in lead induced by the Swedish phase-out of leaded gasoline on average implied a reduction in crime by between 5 and 12 percent. We also show that the effect on crime is not likely to operate via cognitive skills, but rather it seems as if lead exposure matters because it adversely affects attention, impulsivity, and aggression. As the levels of lead exposure studied in this paper are lower than the current government safety levels, our results suggest that further lowering the threshold may lead to substantial cost reductions to society from decreased crime.


• "Labour Market Training and Crime", with Julien Grenet and Stephen Machin
• "Neighborhoods and Crime among Disadvantaged Youth", with Olof Åslund, Susan Niknami and Per-Olof Robling
• "The Intergenerational Consequences of Time Preferences: Parental Investment Behavior and Children's Lifetime Outcomes", with Bart Golsteyn, Lena Lindahl and André Richter

Teachning academic year 2012/13

• Policy Analysis in Labour Economics, (graduate level) with Peter Fredriksson (NE)
• Social Economics, (PhD level) with Peter Nilsson (IIES)
Preliminary syllabus.


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• Curriculum Vitae.pdf
• YOUTH UNEMPLOYMENT AND CRIME 130104.pdf