Had a great time hanging out and presenting mine, @jmerilainen & @celine_zipfel's joint work at ASWEDE this year 🥳

In 2011 I was the only Development Economics at the dept at Stockholm School of Economics. Today we’re a growing devo family – and we just celebrated two new publications 🎉 Feeling proud, grateful & a little teary-eyed ❤️ #SSE #devoecon

Early Childhood Education is central to India’s NEP and global edu goals. In a new paper at @EJ_RES ( https://t.co/TkecrDoydL),w/ @pt_berg @marome1, we show private ECE (Nursery/KG) outperform public options, explain 60% of SES gap. In primary school, NO private premium.

Takeaway: Technological change is not only an economic phenomenon, but also a political one. The milking machine helped bring more women into local government, showing that labor-saving tech can broaden political voice. #EconHistory #Gender #Development @misum_sse @EconomicsSSE

These shifts boosted both the supply of women willing and able to run for office, and the demand from parties and voters open to supporting them.

Why? The machine shifted a previously female-only task to men, blurring gendered work boundaries. Combined with time savings and broader rural economic change, this put women in a stronger position to take up new economic and civic opportunities.

📊 Key finding: In places where milking machines spread, more women entered local councils. A 1 SD increase in adoption explains ~10% of the overall rise in female representation between 1950–72.

We use municipality-level historical data and estimate first-difference and IV models. Our IV leverages pre-1950 cattle intensity 🐄 (a proxy for exposure to mechanized milking), similar to the shift-share instrument of Ager et al. (2025) in Norway.

Finland is a great test case. In 1950, women held <10% of local council seats. Their share grew steadily in the decades that followed.

Before 1950, milking was women’s work. When milking machines arrived, men increasingly took over. 👉Our question: did this technological shock affect women’s political representation?

New working paper 📄 "Engines of Empowerment: Cattle Tending, The Milking Machine and Women in Politics," with @babaforslund & @jmerilainen👉 https://t.co/cIKIasnBmE @EconomicsSSE @misum_sse How a gender-biased, labor-saving technology reshaped local politics in rural Finland:

Why? The machine shifted a previously female-only task to men, blurring gendered work boundaries. Combined with time savings and broader rural economic change, this put women in a stronger position to take up new economic and civic opportunities.

📊 Key finding: In places where milking machines spread, more women entered local councils. A 1 SD increase in adoption explains ~10% of the overall rise in female representation between 1950–72.

We use municipality-level historical data and estimate first-difference and IV models. Our IV leverages pre-1930 cattle intensity 🐄 (a proxy for exposure to mechanized milking), similar to the shift-share instrument of Ager et al. (2025) in Norway.

Finland is a great test case. In 1950, women held <10% of local council seats. Their share grew steadily in the decades that followed.

Before 1950, milking was women’s work. When milking machines arrived, men increasingly took over. 👉 Our question: did this technological shock affect women’s political representation?

@KNBStats collaborated with @StatsSweden and @Oxford_CSAE to build capacity in R. Click on the link to understand the basics of R training https://t.co/0xbLNxjEg8 @Planning_Ke @KenyaGovernors @StrathU @DiscoverJKUAT @ONS @AfDB_Group @ECA_OFFICIAL @jumuiya @Data4SDGs @UNStats

It's been a while since I did a standard lit review thread, but here's one for #econsky #econtwitter about an important literature that's been growing recently: the effect of supply- and demand-side interventions on fertility in LMICs

The Department of Economics at the Stockholm School of Economics is looking to hire to RAs. Read more and apply here: https://t.co/L0EPof1Ebk. @econ_ra

#Econtwitter !! Job alert !! The Dept of Econ. at Stockholm University is hiring a full professor of economics. Join our collaborative, thriving, and ambitious community where academic and personal freedoms are core institutions. Deadline March 31!