Publications by authors named "Dan-Olof Rooth"

This paper shows that early-life health is an important determinant of labor market vulnerability during macroeconomic downturns. Using data on twins during Sweden's crisis of the early 1990s, we show that individuals with higher birth weight are differentially less likely to receive unemployment insurance benefits after the crisis as compared to before it, and that this effect is concentrated among workers in the private sector. While differences in early-life health thus lead to increased inequality in employment outcomes, we also find that there is no differential effect of birth weight on total income after the crisis.

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We provide new evidence on the long-run labor market penalty of teenage overweight and obesity using unique and large-scale data on 150,000 male siblings from the Swedish military enlistment. Our empirical analysis provides four important results. First, we provide the first evidence of a large adult male labor market penalty for being overweight or obese as a teenager.

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Whereas a large literature has shown the importance of early life health for adult socioeconomic outcomes, there is little evidence on the importance of adolescent health. We contribute to the literature by studying the impact of adolescent health status on adult labor market outcomes using a unique and large-scale dataset covering almost the entire population of Swedish males. We show that most types of major conditions have long-run effects on future outcomes, and that the strongest effects result from mental conditions.

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This study examined whether automatic stereotypes captured by the implicit association test (IAT) can predict real hiring discrimination against the obese. In an unobtrusive field experiment, job applications were sent to a large number of real job vacancies. The applications were matched on credentials but differed with respect to the applicant's weight.

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