This paper examines the conditions for business success in rural Sweden, with a particular focus on differences between business owners who have grown up in rural areas (“stayers”) and those who have migrated there as adults (“in-movers”). We draw on a unique, large-scale survey, linked to administrative register data, covering business owners aged 25–55 with firms of up to ten employees. This combined dataset provides detailed insights into both perceptions of business conditions and objective background characteristics.Our analysis shows that business owners in rural municipalities place greater weight on both enabling and constraining factors than their counterparts in non-rural areas, reflecting the thinner institutional environment of rural regions. Within rural areas, stayers emphasize locally embedded factors, e.g., municipal responsiveness and access to local services, whereas in-movers highlight the importance of communications and transport infrastructure and are more often oriented toward external markets. Regression analyses reveal that these differences are largely attributable to compositional factors: in-movers are more educated, more often female, and more likely to operate in skill-intensive service sectors, while stayers are concentrated in agriculture and other location-dependent industries. Robustness checks confirm that our conclusions remain stable across alternative specifications.These findings highlight the complementary roles of stayers and in-movers in rural entrepreneurial ecosystems. Policy interventions should therefore be multifaceted, strengthening local institutions and services while also investing in transport and digital infrastructure to support diverse forms of rural entrepreneurship.

Fathers’ parental leave uptake remains low in many advanced economies despite substantial policy efforts. We study a setting where financial and eligibility barriers are minimal: employed, native-born first-time fathers entitled to generous, non-transferable leave benefits. Using Swedish population register data for 1995–2015, we document three key facts: (i) low uptake follows a persistent U-shaped income gradient, (ii) its determinants vary across the distribution—economic constraints at the bottom and top, workplace norms in the middle—and (iii) these constraints have grown more salient over time. Quota reforms increased uptake on average but did not narrow differences between constrained and unconstrained fathers. Using quasi-random sibling-sex composition, we show that exposure to traditional gender-role environments increases the likelihood of low uptake, especially in recent cohorts. The results highlight the limits of financial incentives and point to workplace and household norms as central barriers to equal parental leave participation.

As women’s earnings have risen and parental leave policies expanded, expectations for paternal involvement have grown, potentially shifting the basis of fatherhood from economic provision toward men’s parenting skills. Using Swedish administrative data and a sibling fixed-effects design, we find that non-cognitive ability, key dimension of parenting skills, has become a stronger predictor of fatherhood over time among men with comparable earnings and marital histories. Exploiting a 2002 reform that expanded reserved paternity leave, we further demonstrate that heightened expectations for paternal involvement amplified this selection even when accounting for marriage and earnings. Taken together, the results suggest that societal shifts have altered the traits that shape men’s entry into fatherhood.

Lokala bankkontor, goda möjligheter till transporter samt kollektivtrafik av hög kvalitet är således viktiga faktorer för ett framgångsrikt företagande i Kronobergs län, skriver Lina Aldén, Mats Hammarstedt och Per Skedinger vid Linnéuniversitetet.

Säkerställ att kollektivtrafik och transporter till landsbygden håller hög kvalitet, uppmanar forskarna Lina Aldén, Mats Hammarstedt och Per Skedinger.

Our use of longitudinal register data combined with a unique survey allows us to offer a more comprehensive picture of rural self-employment than in previous studies. We find that self-employed in rural settings are more likely than those in metropolitan regions to employ others, but self-employment rates in rural areas are lower. There is substantial heterogeneity among the rural self-employed; in-movers are quite different from stayers in terms of their perceptions of the conditions necessary for business success and their employment practices. Policy initiatives aimed at fostering development in rural areas should consider these distinctions.

Den ökade jämställdheten, både vad gäller ekonomi och föräldraansvar, har radikalt förändrat vad det innebär att vara pappa. Har då denna förändring haft någon påverkan på vilka män som blir pappor och vilka pappor som involverar sig aktivt i omsorgen om sina barn och tar ut föräldraledighet? Rapportförfattarna finner att mäns sociala kompetens har blivit viktigare för att bli pappa. De finner också att de fäder som inte tar ut föräldrapenningdagar i allt högre grad är låginkomsttagare och tjänar mindre än barnens mor. Resultaten tyder på att det behövs åtgärder med fokus på att stödja utvecklingen av sociala förmågor bland unga män, att stödja fäder med bristande ekonomiska resurser och att bryta traditionella könsnormer.

We study if there is an association between culture on gender roles and the gender gap in choice of major. For this purpose, we use the epidemiological approach and sibling comparisons. We find that the gender gap in STEM is smaller for individuals who originate in countries where women are more likely, relative to men, to major in STEM. We observe a similar pattern when we study the probability to major in a male- or female-dominated field. We present suggestive evidence that cultural beliefs explain our results. Thus, to limit gender segregation in education this study points to the importance of changing gendered beliefs about educational choices. However, the results indicate that the gender convergence in STEM and male-dominated fields is driven by the fact that men, not women, choose less gender-typical majors. This suggests that to increase women’s participation in STEM and male-dominated fields, policies in other areas, e.g., directed towards changing workplace characteristics, may also be necessary.

We study immigrant-native differences in long-term self-employment in Sweden combining population-wide register data and a unique survey targeting a large representative sample of the total population of long-term self-employment. Using the registers, we analyze the evolution of labor and capital incomes during the first 10 years following self-employment entry. We find that immigrant-native differences in labor income become smaller, whereas immigrant-native differences in capital income grow stronger, over the course of self-employment. These findings are robust to controlling for factors such as organizational form and type of industry. We use the survey data to gain further insights into immigrant-native differences among the long-term self-employed, and show that immigrant self-employed experience more problems and earn less, but work harder than native self-employed. They also have a less personal relation to their customers, do not enjoy their work as much as natives, and appear to have different perspectives on self-employment in general.