Introduction: This study aimed to compare preoperative education level, income level, and geographical birthplace between patients undergoing metal-on-metal hip resurfacing (MoM-HR) and those receiving a conventional uncemented total hip arthroplasty (THA).

Methods: All patients with osteoarthritis who underwent a MoM-HR or an uncemented THA registered in the Swedish Arthroplasty Register 1999–2014 were included (n = 15,871). National databases provided additional information on household income and the highest achieved education. 1481 MoM-HR patients were matched to 1481 uncemented THA patients based on age, sex, and Charlson comorbidity index. Odds ratios (OR) of MoM-HR surgery depending on socioeconomic variables were calculated using logistic regression analysis.

Results: The OR of having MoM-HR surgery was lower among patients with lower education level compared to those with a university degree. Also, 37% of the MoM-HR patients had an income in the 2 highest quintiles compared to 32% of uncemented THA patients. There was no difference in accessibility of MoM-HR surgery between patients born in or outside Sweden.

Conclusions: In Sweden, within a universal healthcare coverage system, lower socioeconomic status in terms of education level was associated with decreased accessibility to innovative hip surgery, i.e., MoM-HR.

Declining labor force participation of older men throughout the 20th century and recent increases in participation have generated substantial interest in understanding the effect of public pensions on retirement. The National Bureau of Economic Research's International Social Security (ISS) Project, a long-term collaboration among researchers in a dozen developed countries, has explored this and related questions. The project employs a harmonized approach to conduct within-country analyses that are combined for meaningful cross-country comparisons. The key lesson is that the choices of policy makers affect the incentive to work at older ages and these incentives have important effects on retirement behavior.

We estimate the causal effects of parental incarceration on children’s short- and long-run outcomes using administrative data from Sweden. Our empirical strategy exploits exogenous variation in parental incarceration from the random assignment of criminal defendants to judges with different incarceration tendencies. We find that incarceration of a parent in childhood leads to a significant increase in teen criminal convictions, a decrease in schooling outcomes, and worse labour market outcomes in adulthood. The effects are concentrated among children from disadvantaged families, in particular families where the remaining non-convicted parent is disadvantaged. These results suggest that the incarceration of parents with young children may significantly increase the intergenerational persistence of poverty and criminal behaviour in affluent countries with extensive social safety nets and progressive criminal justice systems.

This study examines the long-term association between income and life expectancy in Sweden between 1960 and 2021. The study is based on register data that include all Swedish permanent residents aged 40 y and older. The results show that the gap in life expectancy between the top and bottom income percentiles widened substantially: For men, it increased from 3.5 y in the 1960s to 10.9 y by the 2010s, and for women, from 3.8 y in the 1970s to 8.6 y by the 2010s. Despite a reduction in income inequality and an expansion of social spending from the 1960s to the 1990s, health inequality continuously increased over the period under study. The changes of the relation between real income and life expectancy, the so-called Preston curve, reveal a much faster improvement in life expectancy in the upper half of the income distribution than suggested by the cross-sectional relation between income and life expectancy. Analysis of causes of death identified circulatory diseases as the main contributor to improved longevity, while cancer contributed more to the increased gap in life expectancy for women and equally for men. Finally, analysis of the change in the income gradient in avoidable causes of death showed the strongest contribution of preventable causes, both for men and women.

This paper documents how the inequality of household equivalent disposable income has changed in Sweden over the period 1990–2021. We find that income inequality has unambiguously increased. Measured by the Gini coefficient, inequality increased from around 0.19 to almost 0.3 by the end of 2020. We then analyse the backgrounds to this change by measuring the importance of changes in different components of the overall income distribution: the wage distribution; the distribution of hours of work; capital incomes; income differences between labour market participants and non-participants; income redistribution through income taxes and benefits; and, finally, the effect of increased immigration to Sweden.

We explore the role of identity along multiple dimensions in high-stakes decision-making. Our data contain information about demographic and socioeconomic indicators for defendants and randomly assigned jurors in a Swedish court. Our results show that defendants are 4 to 6 percent less likely to get a prison sentence if judged by one more juror belonging to the same identity-forming group. Moreover, they are given 10 percent shorter prison sentences. Socioeconomic background and demographic attributes are equally important for identity effects, and these effects stem from trials of longer duration and where the defendant is present in the courtroom.

Background and purpose: Several randomized trials have demonstrated the lack of effect of arthroscopic lavage as treatment for knee osteoarthritis (OA). These results have in turn resulted in a change in Swedish guidelines and reimbursement. We aimed to investigate the use of knee arthroscopies in Sweden between 2002 and 2016. Patient demographics, regional differences, and the magnitude of patients with knee OA undergoing knee arthroscopy were also analyzed.

Patients and methods: Trends in knee arthroscopy were investigated using the Swedish Hospital Discharge Register (SHDR) to conduct a nationwide register-based study including all adults (>18 years of age) undergoing any knee arthroscopy between 2002 and 2016.

Results: The total number of knee arthroscopies performed during the studied period was 241,055. The annual surgery rate declined in all age groups, for males and females as well as patients with knee OA. The incidence dropped from 247 to 155 per 10⁵ inhabitants. Over 50% of arthroscopies were performed in metropolitan regions.

Conclusion: We showed a dramatic decline in knee arthroscopy. There is variability in the surgery rate between males and females and among the regions of Sweden.

We explore the role of identity along multiple dimensions in high-stakes decisionmaking.Our data contain information about demographic and socioeconomic indicatorsfor randomly assigned jurors and defendants in a Swedish court. Our results showthat defendants are 15 percent less likely to get a prison sentence if they and the jurorsbelong to the same identity-forming groups. Socioeconomic background and demographicattributes are at least as important, and combining several identities producesstronger e ects.

We use a large sample of Swedish-born adoptees and their biological and adopting parents to decompose the persistence in health inequality across generations into pre-birth and post-birth components. We use three sets of measures for health outcomes in the second generation: mortality, measures based on data on hospitalization, and measures using birth outcomes for the third generation. The results show that all of the persistence in mortality is transmitted solely via pre-birth factors, while the results for the hospitalization measures suggest that at least three-quarters of the intergenerational persistence in health is attributable to the biological parents.