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Tuomas Pekkarinen

VATT Institute for Economic Research, Finland, and IZA, Germany

Dr Tuomas Pekkarinen sadly passed away on November 29, 2022. Until his death he served as a Senior Research Fellow at the VATT Institute for Economic Research in Helsinki, as an Adjunct Professor at Aalto University School of Business, and as a member of the Swedish Labour Market Council. Pekkarinen's research included, among other things, the economics of education.

IZA World of Labor role

Author

Research interest

Labor economics, economics of education

Website

http://bit.ly/Pekkarinen_IZApage

Positions/functions as a policy advisor

Member of the Swedish Labour Policy Council 2015–2018; External expert for the Belgian Science Policy Office, 2012

Past positions

Senior Researcher, VATT Institute for Economic Research, Finland; Research Fellow, IFAU, Uppsala, Finland; Prize Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Nuffield College, University of Oxford, UK

Qualifications

PhD Economics, European University Institute, 2003

Selected publications

  • “Cognitive consequences of the timing of puberty." Labour Economics 54 (2018): 1–13 (with K. Koerselman).

  • “Secular rise in economically valuable personality traits.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114:25 (2017): 6527–6532 (with M. Jokela, M. Sarvimäki, M. Terviö, and R. Uusitalo).

  • “The evolution of social mobility: Norway over the 20th century.” Scandinavian Journal of Economics 8 (2017) (with K. G. Salvanes and M. Sarvimäki).

  • “Gender differences in behavior under competitive pressure: Evidence on omission patterns in university entrance examinations.” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 115 (2015): 94–110.

article(s)

  • School tracking and intergenerational social mobility Updated

    Postponing school tracking can increase social mobility without significant adverse effects on educational achievement

    Tuomas Pekkarinen, December 2018
    The goal of school tracking (assigning students to different types of school by ability) is to increase educational efficiency by creating more homogeneous groups of students that are easier to teach. However, there are concerns that, if begun too early in the schooling process, tracking may improve educational attainment at the cost of reduced intergenerational social mobility. Recent empirical evidence finds no evidence of an efficiency–equality trade-off when tracking is postponed.
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