Photo of Olav Nygård

Olav Nygård

Associate Professor

Inequality in Education and the Labour Market

I investigate the differences in educational outcomes and sorting into different parts of the labor market between young swedes with immigrant and non-immigrant background. 

Current projects

In the project Improving schools - but how? we study local and regional efforts to improve school results and increase equality in education. The project uses mixed-methods and consists of two parts: efforts to improve results in rural schools, and efforts to improve results in marginalized areas in larger towns and cities.

I also study school-to-work transitions for early school leavers ("dropouts" from upper secondary school), and gender norms and labour market outcomes. In all projects, I am particularly interested in how multiple forms of inequality - primarily relating to gender, migration background, occupational status, and level of education - interact, and how they are reproduced or transformed in different contexts.

Previous projects

My thesis used theories of social capital, closure, embeddedness and social stratification, to investigate the differences in educational outcomes and the subsequent sorting into different tiers of the labor market between young swedes with and without immigrant background. A key interest was the potential of less-functional social networks, and the possibility of unequal returns to social capital depending on ethnicity, race, gender and socio-economic background.

I have also worked on a project for Myndigheten för Kulturanalys (The Swedish Agency for Cultural Policy Analysis), wherein we studied representation of people of immigrant descent and gender in Swedish public cultural institutions.


Publications

2023

Andrey Tibajev, Olav Nygård (2023) Origin-country gender norms, individual work experience, and employment among immigrant women in Sweden Frontiers in Human Dynamics, Vol. 5, Article 1071800 Continue to DOI
Zhanna Kravchenko, Olav Nygård (2023) Extracurricular activities and educational ouctomes: evidence from high-performing schools in St Petersburg, Russia International Studies in Sociology of Education, Vol. 32, p. 1106-1125 Continue to DOI

2022

Nate Breznau, Eike Mark Rinke, Alexander Wuttke, Hung H. V. Nguyen, Muna Adem, Jule Adriaans, Amalia Alvarez-Benjumea, Henrik K. Andersen, Daniel Auer, Flavio Azevedo, Oke Bahnsen, Dave Balzer, Gerrit Bauer, Paul C. Bauer, Markus Baumann, Sharon Baute, Verena Benoit, Julian Bernauer, Carl Berning, Anna Berthold, Felix S. Bethke, Thomas Biegert, Katharina Blinzler, Johannes N. Blumenberg, Licia Bobzien, Andrea Bohman, Thijs Bol, Amie Bostic, Zuzanna Brzozowska, Katharina Burgdorf, Kaspar Burger, Kathrin B. Busch, Juan Carlos-Castillo, Nathan Chan, Pablo Christmann, Roxanne Connelly, Christian S. Czymara, Elena Damian, Alejandro Ecker, Achim Edelmann, Maureen A. Eger, Simon Ellerbrock, Anna Forke, Andrea Forster, Chris Gaasendam, Konstantin Gavras, Vernon Gayle, Theresa Gessler, Timo Gnambs, Amélie Godefroidt, Olav Nygård, Andrey Tibajev (2022) Observing many researchers using the same data and hypothesis reveals a hidden universe of uncertainty Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Vol. 119 Continue to DOI
Nate Breznau, Eike Mark Rinke, Alexander Wuttke, Hung H. V. Nguyen, Muna Adem, Jule Adriaans, Amalia Alvarez-Benjumea, Henrik K. Andersen, Daniel Auer, Flavio Azevedo, Oke Bahnsen, Dave Balzer, Gerrit Bauer, Paul C. Bauer, Markus Baumann, Sharon Baute, Verena Benoit, Julian Bernauer, Carl Berning, Anna Berthold, Felix S. Bethke, Thomas Biegert, Katharina Blinzler, Johannes N. Blumenberg, Licia Bobzien, Andrea Bohman, Thijs Bol, Amie Bostic, Zuzanna Brzozowska, Katharina Burgdorf, Kaspar Burger, Kathrin B. Busch, Juan Carlos-Castillo, Nathan Chan, Pablo Christmann, Roxanne Connelly, Christian S. Czymara, Elena Damian, Alejandro Ecker, Achim Edelmann, Maureen A. Eger, Simon Ellerbrock, Anna Forke, Andrea Forster, Chris Gaasendam, Konstantin Gavras, Vernon Gayle, Theresa Gessler, Timo Gnambs, Amelie Godefroidt, Max Groemping, Martin Gross, Stefan Gruber, Tobias Gummer, Andreas Hadjar, Jan Paul Heisig, Sebastian Hellmeier, Stefanie Heyne, Magdalena Hirsch, Mikael Hjerm, Oshrat Hochman, Andreas Hovermann, Sophia Hunger, Christian Hunkler, Nora Huth, Zsofia S. Ignacz, Laura Jacobs, Jannes Jacobsen, Bastian Jaeger, Sebastian Jungkunz, Nils Jungmann, Mathias Kauff, Manuel Kleinert, Julia Klinger, Jan-Philipp Kolb, Marta Kolczynska, John Kuk, Katharina Kunissen, Dafina Kurti Sinatra, Alexander Langenkamp, Philipp M. Lersch, Lea-Maria Lobel, Philipp Lutscher, Matthias Mader, Joan E. Madia, Natalia Malancu, Luis Maldonado, Helge Marahrens, Nicole Martin, Paul Martinez, Jochen Mayerl, Oscar J. Mayorga, Patricia McManus, Kyle McWagner, Cecil Meeusen, Daniel Meierrieks, Jonathan Mellon, Friedolin Merhout, Samuel Merk, Daniel Meyer, Leticia Micheli, Jonathan Mijs, Cristobal Moya, Marcel Neunhoeffer, Daniel Nust, Olav Nygård, Fabian Ochsenfeld, Gunnar Otte, Anna O. Pechenkina, Christopher Prosser, Louis Raes, Kevin Ralston, Miguel R. Ramos, Arne Roets, Jonathan Rogers, Guido Ropers, Robin Samuel, Gregor Sand, Ariela Schachter, Merlin Schaeffer, David Schieferdecker, Elmar Schlueter, Regine Schmidt, Katja M. Schmidt, Alexander Schmidt-Catran, Claudia Schmiedeberg, J. Urgen Schneider, Martijn Schoonvelde, Julia Schulte-Cloos, Sandy Schumann, Reinhard Schunck, J. Urgen Schupp, Julian Seuring, Henning Silber, Willem Sleegers, Nico Sonntag, Alexander Staudt, Nadia Steiber, Nils Steiner, Sebastian Sternberg, Dieter Stiers, Dragana Stojmenovska, Nora Storz, Erich Striessnig, Anne-Kathrin Stroppe, Janna Teltemann, Andrey Tibajev, Brian Tung, Giacomo Vagni, Jasper Van Assche, Meta van der Linden, Jolanda van der Noll, Arno Van Hootegem, Stefan Vogtenhuber, Bogdan Voicu, Fieke Wagemans, Nadja Wehl, Hannah Werner, Brenton M. Wiernik, Fabian Winter, Christof Wolf, Yuki Yamada, Nan Zhang, Conrad Ziller, Stefan Zins, Tomasz Zoltak (2022) Observing many researchers using the same data and hypothesis reveals a hidden universe of uncertainty Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Vol. 119, Article e2203150119 Continue to DOI
Zhanna Kravchenko, Olav Nygård (2022) Extracurricular activities and educational ouctomes: evidence from high-performing schools in St Petersburg, Russia International Studies in Sociology of Education Continue to DOI

Organisation