Anna Nordén
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Anna Nordén's research specialization is in gender economics, behavioral economics, and nature conservation. Currently, her research focuses on how economic resources, risks, and responsibilities are shared within couples and households over the life course. Her research examines the role of marriage, divorce, inheritance, pensions, and private agreements in shaping economic security and gender inequality. Using large-scale administrative data, she explores how legal institutions, family, and policy interact.
Alongside this, a central part of her research addresses what motivates individuals to take nature-positive actions. She studies both monetary and non-monetary incentives for voluntary conservation, and currently focuses on second-order beliefs about social norms — that is, how assumptions about what others think and do can shape pro-environmental behavior.
Anna is part of the editorial board of Ekonomisk Debatt. She is also a domestic associate at Environment for Development (EfD) Initiative, member in the Focali network and the researcher lead at the foundation Ownershift.
She is chairing the local organizing committee for the 9th Swedish Conference in Economics at JIBS 20-21 November 2026.
Ongoing projects
Marital Agreements and Economic Gender Equality (joint with Lina Aldén, Anne Boschini, Anna Nordén. Funded by Åke Wiberg's Foundation and the Kamprad Family Foundation)
This project examines marital agreements and how they shape economic security and gender equality both within marriage and at divorce. In Sweden, matrimonial law is based on the principle that the value of spouses' assets minus debts is as a default divided equally upon divorce, a principle designed to protect the financially weaker spouse, particularly those who have earned less or taken on greater responsibility for home and family. Couples can, however, choose to depart from this arrangement through a marital agreement specifying how their assets should be divided. Today, roughly one in five married people in Sweden is estimated to have such an agreement. Yet despite their prevalence, we know surprisingly little about who enters into these agreements, what they actually stipulate, and what consequences they carry. This gap matters, because marital agreements ultimately determine how economic resources and risks are allocated between spouses, yet they have remained largely invisible to researchers, as they are not captured in standard administrative data. This project addresses that gap by combining a unique dataset of all marital agreements registered in Sweden with detailed administrative records on, for example, income and family circumstances. Tracking individuals and couples over time, we examine who draws up marital agreements, what kinds of arrangements they choose, and how different agreement types relate to economic security and equality over the life course. The findings will contribute to research on family law and economic inequality, and inform broader public debate about how legislation and private contracts together shape people's financial lives.
Grey Divorce: Economic and Social Consequences for Elderly (joint with Lina Aldén, Anne Boschini, Johannes Hagen, Anna Nordén, Jana Schuetz. Funded by Kamprad Family Foundation)
Despite the decline in gender inequality in the labour market, differences in pension outcomes remain large and persistent. One potentially important and relatively under-researched explanation is that divorce among older people has increased sharply in recent decades. When couples separate late in life, opportunities to recover financial losses are limited, and women are hit particularly hard since pension rights are not divided upon divorce. In this research project, we analyse the economic and social consequences of divorce after the age of 50 — so-called grey divorces. We examine how incomes, pensions and wellbeing change when people divorce late in life. We also study the adjustments that women and men make in terms of work and pension withdrawals, as well as the role of marital agreements, both in relation to the risk of divorcing and the financial consequences when a separation does occur. A central part of the project is the collaboration with the pensioners' organisation SPF Seniorerna to gain insights into how older people themselves experience a late divorce, what changes they have made, and what support they feel they need. The project is expected to generate new knowledge about which groups face the greatest financial risk in the event of a late-life divorce, how and to what extent welfare systems protect them, and whether prenuptial agreements serve as a financial safeguard or instead reinforce inequality.
Work in progress
The Private Regulation of Marriage: Prevalence, Content, and Selection into Marital Agreements in Sweden (joint with Lina Aldén, Anne Boschini, Anna Nordén)
Marriage shapes how couples allocate work, accumulate assets, and insure against risk. Family law provides default rules that redistribute economic risk between spouses, promoting economic security and gender equality. Yet an increasing share of this redistribution is governed by private contract: the use of marital agreements — which allow couples to opt out of default property regimes — has grown across advanced economies. Despite their growing relevance, marital agreements remain largely absent from empirical research. This paper fills this gap using a unique administrative database that covers the universe of marital agreements registered in Sweden since 1970 and is linked to population-wide registers. We document the prevalence and evolution of marital agreements over time, analyze selection into contracting, and examine the factors that drive couples' choices of property regime. We further explore whether observed patterns are consistent with motivations such as asset protection, specialization, or precaution against divorce risk. By making marital agreements observable at the population scale for the first time, this paper establishes essential descriptive foundations for assessing whether default marital property rules effectively serve those they are designed to protect.
Yours, Mine, or Ours? Marital Property Regimes and Within-Couple Gender Inequality (joint with Lina Aldén, Anne Boschini, Anna Nordén, Dmitry Petrov)
How do property rights within marriage shape gender inequality between spouses? This paper examines how marital property regimes affect within-couple gaps in labor market outcomes, wealth, fertility, and relationship stability, focusing on how asset integration shapes the distribution of economic costs and gains from marriage. We exploit regional variation in default property regimes within Spain: while most regions apply the community of property, Catalonia and the Balearic Islands default to separation of property — an institutional difference that generates variation in intra-marital insurance and financial autonomy. Using rich Spanish administrative register data covering 2016–2022, we trace how within-couple gaps in earnings, employment, savings, and wealth evolve around marriage and divorce. An event-study difference-in-differences design allows us to decompose the extent to which the within-couple gender gap is shaped by the property regime. We further examine heterogeneity by assortative mating and pre-marriage earnings gaps, and use cohabiting couples — who face uniform property rules across regions — as a placebo group.
The Role of Marital Agreements in Shaping Intrahousehold Gender Inequality
Using a unique dataset of all marital agreement in Sweden for more than sixty years, we study how private contracting shapes within-couple gender inequality, tracing its consequences for individual economic outcomes — including income, assets, and labour supply — both during marriage and at divorce. By making the property regime inside the household empirically observable, we assess the extent to which private contracting reproduces or reinforces socio-economic gender gaps.
The Family Firm? On Firm Ownership and Marital Agreements
We study how firm ownership intersects with marital contracting, asking whether men and women who own businesses differ systematically in whether and how they protect those assets through marital agreements. We also exploit policy reforms that shifted incentives away from salary withdrawal toward retained firm ownership, using this variation to identify how changes in the value of firm assets affect contracting behaviour.
Keeping it within the Family: Assets, Inheritance, and Marital Agreements
We examine how the prospect of inheriting family wealth shapes both the decision to write a marital agreement and its content, highlighting how couples use private contracting to protect assets intended to remain within a family line.
PhD supervision
Current:
Tanmay Singh (expected to graduate September 2027)
Previous:
Miquel Correa (graduated September 2023)
Teaching
Anna currently teaches Microeconomic Priciples as well as Entrepreneurship and Economics for Sustainable Societies as well as supervising Bachelor and Master students. She has also taught a variety of courses, including Environmental Economics, Mathematics for Economics.
Biography
Anna earned her PhD in economics in 2013 at University of Gothenburg and held a research position there until 2015. She also did a postdoc at Lund University between 2013-2016. In her previous research she has used stated preference methods, natural field experiments and impact evaluations applied to policy design for national parks and payment for ecosystem service in Costa Rica as well as forest management and forest certification schemes in Sweden.
Between 2017-2018 she was the project manager of the Nordic part of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) led by Jeffrey Sachs. She combined this role with her position as a senior environmental and climate advisor to Sida at the Gothenburg Centre for Sustainable Development. Anna has also had an active role in a capacity building program Inclusive Green Economy in Practice in East Africa.
Anna started her position at JIBS in 2019.