Research Professor Tuomas Pekkarinen died of a sudden seizure in his office on 29 November 2022. His death came without warning: that very morning he had been out for a run and was in the middle of editing an article, just accepted for publication, on the effect of education on youth crime. Many projects were left unfinished. On the wall of his office at VATT there remained a list of ten ongoing projects.
Born in 1972, Tuomas spent his childhood in the suburbs of Espoo and his youth in Töölö. He studied for his master's degree at the University of Helsinki in the 1990s, where, besides economics, he became acquainted with the foundations of many other social sciences. Tuomas became known to his fellow students as an active conversationalist with wide-ranging interests in social affairs and research. His particular interest turned to the empirical study of labour markets. He joked that, after a theory-heavy undergraduate degree, the only option left was to continue on an academic career.
At the end of the last millennium, the econometrics component of the national doctoral programme in economics (KAVA) consisted of a couple of weeks' summer course that was far removed from applications. Students who followed the scholarly journals on the handy shelves of the Faculty of Social Sciences library ("Valtsika") were already aware of the rapid progress of applied microeconometrics around the world — a development that years later came to be called the credibility revolution. It was clear that a budding researcher seriously interested in empirical work would do well to go abroad. Tuomas went to the European University Institute in Florence, where he defended his dissertation in 2003. In it he studied wage differences between firms and showed, among other things, that the complexity of a firm's production process raises wages across all of the firm's jobs, regardless of how demanding they are.1
After completing his doctorate, Tuomas was hired for a three-year postdoc position at the University of Oxford. His research career then continued at Uppsala University and IFAU, from where he returned to Finland in 2007 as an Academy Research Fellow at the Helsinki School of Economics. After his return, he made year-long research visits to Boston University and the London School of Economics. From 2014 onward he worked as a research director at the VATT Institute for Economic Research and taught at Aalto University.
Tuomas studied a wide range of topics with numerous co-authors. His best-known research focused on young people's educational choices and on the significance of gender and family background. Often the question was one of evaluating the effects of policy decisions. Tuomas's most-cited article is a study of the effect of the comprehensive school reform on the intergenerational income correlation. This correlation had already been widely documented, as it is regarded as one of the best measures of equality of opportunity. The article was among the first to show convincingly that policy decisions can substantially advance equality of opportunity. Later, Tuomas and his co-authors showed that the comprehensive school reform improved the outcomes of the children of less-educated parents in the Defence Forces' psychological tests.2
In research with various co-authors he also showed that the social skills valued in working life had grown between cohorts as rapidly as cognitive abilities, and that providing better information about the labour-market success of different degrees has little effect on upper-secondary students' educational choices. Tuomas also studied long-term changes in social mobility, the effects of school reforms on party support, the connection between the timing of puberty and boys' school performance, the effect of education on crime, and the effects of lighter alcohol taxation on sickness absences.3
One recurring theme in Tuomas's research was the differences between women and men. This work showed, among other things, that making educational choices at age 15–16 increases the share of women in general upper-secondary education, that women take fewer risks than men in university entrance examinations, and that women are promoted less often than men who perform equally well in the same jobs. His best-known study on gender differences showed that boys' performance varies more strongly than girls' in almost all countries that take part in the PISA study.4
Tuomas brought forward the themes he considered important, and his research mattered. He was among the first to open the debate on the effects of higher-education entrance examinations, and later led a research group evaluating the effects of the student-admissions reform. Tuomas consistently opposed the early sorting of pupils into ability groups, because he believed, on the basis of research evidence, that this increases the weight of parental background in children's success. Beyond erasing the old divide between the grammar school and the elementary school, he would gladly also have done away with the boundaries between general and vocational upper-secondary schools — not to mention higher-education entrance exams and their coaching courses. More concretely, Tuomas helped young people from more challenging backgrounds with their educational choices by leading the Oma Linja ("My Path") project, funded by the Strategic Research Council, in which randomly selected lower-secondary schools trialled a new way of helping young people find the post-comprehensive study place best suited to them.
Tuomas was an important teacher, supervisor, and role model. He managed to teach labour economics, macroeconomics, and applied econometrics in three languages in four countries. His courses were clear and exceptionally well prepared. For some, being Tuomas's student was an experience that gave their careers direction. More advanced researchers Tuomas supported as head of VATT's Labour Markets and Education group. Tuomas was a fair and inspiring leader who quietly shielded his group from having to produce pointless reports and pseudo-research. In this way he created space for the members of his group to do scientifically high-quality and socially important work.
In the research community of the Economicum, Tuomas's broad expertise radiated to many colleagues and students. He devoted a great deal of time to commenting on others' research, theses, and seminar presentations. What guided his effort was the interest and importance of each piece of research, not the demands of his official job description or the student's home university. In seminars, Tuomas's sometimes sharp (but well-meaning) comments did not let those taking shortcuts sidestep the limitations of their research designs. He took a dim view of hype or the exaggeration of uncertain results in any form.
More broadly, Tuomas Pekkarinen played an important role as an uncompromising defender of the independence and quality of social-science research. When meeting decision-makers and appearing in the media, he radiated incontrovertible expertise and integrity. He did not hesitate to state his position clearly when the situation demanded it. Yet this was never about self-aggrandizement or putting others down. A conversation with him was all the more enjoyable the more clearly one disagreed with him. Tuomas could distinguish facts from opinions — including his own — and could challenge his interlocutor in a way that was stimulating but fundamentally kind. Given a sufficiently convincing argument or empirical evidence, he was also ready to update his views.