Hanna Mühlrad

This program provides new and policy-relevant knowledge on how the design of social insurance systems impacts individual and societal outcomes that are important for supporting a sustainable, inclusive, and health-promoting working life, in line with the 2030 Agenda goals. To this end, the program offers 14 research projects analyzing income insurances for illness, unemployment, or old age.The key novelty of the program is that it broadens the analytic approach of most previous research in two parallel ways. First, it widens the scope of outcomes to comprise not only employment outcomes but also work conditions, poverty, health and well-being for the individuals at risk, and for their family members and society at large. Secondly, it takes to heart the fact that both the income protection and the incentives that individuals face are increasingly determined by access to complementary insurances and – for foreign-born individuals – by whether a coordination of social insurances is in place between Sweden and their country of origin. Our broad approach is made possible by combining administrative data from government agencies and collaborating insurance providers with data on complementary insurances and international agreements that we collect ourselves. The research consists of both detailed descriptive analyses and state-of-the-art causal approaches.The program is led and managed by Associate Professor Lisa Laun at IFAU and brings together 18 scholars and experts in economics, political science, statistics and public health, from several leading departments and institutes in Sweden and abroad. We form a new inter-disciplinary team of researchers of different academic seniority, with extensive experience in analyzing social insurances, who will collaborate in various constellations and meet all together at annual conferences. The program will thus further strengthen and broaden the cross-disciplinary research environment at and around IFAU and in Sweden.

The rapid influx of refugee children in Swedish schools during the 2015 refugee crisis posed a great challenge to receiving communities and schools by putting pressure on school resources, teaching capacity and classrooms. Understanding the effects of accommodating refugee children on the human capital accumulation of incumbent and refugee pupils, teaching resources and school segregation in host communities, and providing evidence on effectiveness of policy measures are central to further developing successful school, migration and integration policies. The purpose of this project is thus twofold, and focuses on the following research questions:The causal effects of receiving large numbers of refugee students.Municipal and school variation in exposure to the influx of new pupils in 2015 is exploited to analyze the causal effects of refugee accommodation in schools on 1) incumbent and refugee students by gender and socioeconomic background, 2) school resources 3) teachers, and 4) local school markets. We study school results, school and teaching resources, teacher and student mobility, equity and segregation.The effectiveness of policy measures targeted towards immigrant students.a) An evaluation of the effects of the targeted support program to municipalities launched by the National Agency for Education (NAE) in 2016, which aimed to facilitate refugee reception of and improve the quality of education for recently arrived children and Swedish learners. The evaluation focuses on the same set of outcomes 1)-4) mentioned above and exploits the randomized toll out of the program.b) The effects of early school start on language skills and school performance of immigrant children. The research is motivated by recent policy initiatives which favor mandatory pre-school from age 5 to improve language skills of immigrant children.