Daniel Cunha Byström

I am a Ph.D. student in Economics at the University of Gothenburg. My research is in applied microeconomics, with interests spanning the economics of crime, labor economics, and public policy. I work with large-scale administrative registers – including newly linked data on confirmed gang members – to study how criminal behavior, labor markets , and social institutions interact.

My current projects examine (i) how family transmission and peer exposure facilitate gang recruitment and the expansion of organized crime groups in Sweden; (ii) how local incarceration rates shape neighborhood crime across subpopulations; and (iii) how gang-related violence influences firms and local economic activity.

I am on the 2025–26 academic job market.

Research

From Friends to ‘Family’: Schools, Neighborhoods, and Gang Recruitment (Job Market Paper)
Draft available upon request.

Abstract

This paper studies how gang influence spreads through family and peer networks, and how exposure to peers with family connections to gangs contributes to gang expansion. I combine novel Swedish police data on gang members with administrative records on family links, schools, neighborhoods, crime, education, and health. I define gateway (GW) peers as students whose relatives have prior gang-related offending. Using male students in grade 7, I leverage cohort-to-cohort variation in exposure to GW peers in schools and neighborhoods. I find that exposure to GW peers increases the probability of being listed as a gang member. A 5 percentage point increase in exposure to GW peers with older brothers who have prior gang-related offending raises the probability of gang listing by about 14 percent relative to the mean. I find no corresponding effects for exposure to peers whose older brothers have prior criminal offending that is not gang-related. Additional evidence points to a recruitment-based mechanism. Co-offending patterns extend beyond GW peers to their older brothers and other gang members, and the effects weaken when the older brother is incarcerated, lives elsewhere, or is older than the typical recruiter age range. The effects are nonlinear and concentrated among disadvantaged students, while spillovers to female students appear in adolescent mental health rather than crime.

The Effect of Neighborhood Incarceration Rates on the Criminal Behavior of Neighborhood Peers with Randi Hjalmarsson (GU) and Matthew Lindquist (SOFI)

Work in progress

Encrypted Chats and Organized Crime Groups (larger research agenda) with Tom Kirchmaier (LSE), Magdalena Dominguez (IFS), Manne Gerell (MAU), Kim Moeller (MAU)

Age at Crime and Punishment with Akib Khan (SSE) and Erik Lundberg (UU)

Disinformation and Early Childhood Health with Cecilia Ahsan Jansson (GU)

Contact

Email: daniel.cunha.bystrom@gu.se
Location: Gothenburg, Sweden