How Do Teaching Styles Affect Students’ Outcomes?

Teachers matter for students, but we know little about what effective teachers do in classrooms. This paper estimates the causal effect of teaching styles on student achievement. To address endogenous sorting, I exploit a unique institutional setting in which teachers are randomly assigned to classrooms. Using rich survey data, I employ factor analysis to construct multidimensional indices of teaching styles from 25 teaching-practice questions. I find that a one-standard-deviation increase in a Modern Teaching style, characterized by a student-centered approach, raises students’ average test scores by 0.045 standard deviations. However, the impact is highly heterogeneous: while positive on average, the effect is negative for mathematics. Furthermore, the gains are largest for low-ability students, and the effect varies with teachers’ experience and educational background. Analysis of the underlying mechanisms suggests that the positive outcomes are driven by enhanced teacher–student interactions and increased teacher attention to students’ learning conditions.

Classrooms as Workplaces: Student Composition and Teacher Sick Leave

with Krzysztof Karbownik, Helena Svaleryd, and Jonas Vlachos

Work-related burnout and stress-related sickness absence have become increasingly prevalent, but evidence on which workplace features shape workers’ mental health remains limited. Using population-level Swedish register data covering all lower- and upper-secondary teachers from 2006–2024, we show that schools serving more disadvantaged students exhibit substantially higher rates of sickness absence, particularly for stress-related diagnoses. Exploiting within-teacher variation across student cohorts, we separate sorting from exposure and find that a one standard deviation increase in student disadvantage raises overall and stress-related sick leave by 3.6% and 8.7%, respectively. Survey evidence indicates that these effects operate through classroom conditions rather than workload or organizational differences. The findings establish client composition as a distinct and policy-relevant determinant of worker health in contact-intensive occupations.

Carrots, Sticks, or Both? The Causal Impact of Awards and Discipline on Socio-Emotional Skill Formation

with Axel Norgren

Schools shape human capital not only through what they teach, but also through how they recognize achievement and respond to misconduct. This paper examines how assignment to teachers with different reward and disciplinary classroom management practices shapes adolescents’ socio-emotional development. Under the unique randomly assign teacher and combine a large student panel with homeroom-teacher questionnaires. We distinguish class-level awards, discipline for repeated routine discipline and zero tolerance for first-time serious violations. The estimates reveal a differentiated pattern across skill domains and combinations of practices. At the reference levels of the interacting practices, assignment to teachers reporting more routine discipline predicts a higher composite skill measure, whereas assignment to teachers reporting more awards predicts lower task performance and engagement with others. Positive interactions between awards and disciplinary practices emerge for emotional regulation and university aspirations. These findings highlight the developmental consequences of exposure to different teacher practice profiles and underscore the importance of evaluating rewards and discipline jointly.

The Skill-Based Marriage Gap: Gender Norms and Child Investment

Does higher education make marriage less likely for women in East Asia? Despite rapid educational expansion, marriage rates have declined substantially across East Asia, particularly among highly educated women. This paper develops a microeconomic model of marriage formation that incorporates gender norms and parental investment in children. The model examines how educational attainment shapes marriage incentives differently for men and women, providing a framework for understanding education-based disparities in marriage outcomes.