Persson wrote her PhD dissertation on relationships and communication, with chapters on social insurance and the marriage market, attention manipulation and information overload, and paternalism and libertarianism.
[8] Persson and Maya Rossin-Slater assess, through a regression difference-in-differences (RD-DD) model, the impacts of paternal access to workplace flexibility on maternal postpartum health.
Starting from Kim Weeden et al. (2016)'s finding that mothers face greater expectations to be "on call" for unforeseen domestic needs,[9] Persson's paper analyzes father's demand for workplace flexibility and the spillover effects on maternal wellbeing.
Through this analysis, Persson finds that increasing a father's temporal flexibility reduces the risk of the mother experiencing postpartum health complications.
Moreover, Persson reaffirms that mothers currently bear a disproportionate burden from both career costs and a fathers' inability to respond to domestic shocks.
Persson uses Sweden as an empirical setting, which has minimal inequality in terms of formal access to health care and still find strong socioeconomic gradients.
Persson further illustrates that access to intra-family expertise has a number of positive health impacts, increasing life expectancy, reducing lifestyle-related disease, and improving drug adherence.
[11] In this American Economic Review paper, Persson and Maya Rossin-Slater study how exposure to maternal stress from familial ruptures affects later mental health.
Their findings suggest large potential welfare gains by preventing fetal stress from family ruptures and socioeconomic factors.
In this analysis, Persson attempts to identify a policy tool that would restore the benchmark outcome that would arise under a laissez-faire market without any coerced workers.