| 1. |
- Brinca, Pedro Soares, 1979-
(författare)
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Essays in Quantitative Macroeconomics
- 2013
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In the first essay, Distortions in the Neoclassical Growth Model: A Cross Country Analysis, I show that shocks that express themselves as total factor productivity and labor income taxes are comparably more synchronized than shocks that resemble distortions to the ability of allocating resources across time and states of the world. These two shocks are also the most important to model. Lastly, I document the importance of international channels of transmission for the shocks, given that these are spatially correlated and that international trade variables, such as trade openness correlate particularly well with them. The second essay is called Monetary Business Cycle Accounting for Sweden. Given that the analysis is focused in one country, I can extend the prototype economy to include a nominal interest rate setting rule and government bonds. As in the previous essay, distortions to the labor-leisure condition and total factor productivity are the most relevant margins to be modeled, now joined by deviations from the nominal interest rate setting rule. Also, distortions do not share a structural break during the Great Recession, but they do during the 1990’s. Researchers aiming to model Swedish business cycles must take into account the structural changes the Swedish economy went through in the 1990’s, though not so during the last recession. The third essay, Consumer Confidence and Consumption Spending: Evidence for the United States and the Euro Area, we show that, the consumer confidence index can be in certain circumstances a good predictor of consumption. In particular, out-of-sample evidence shows that the contribution of confidence in explaining consumption expenditures increases when household survey indicators feature large changes, so that confidence indicators can have some increasing predictive power during such episodes. Moreover, there is some evidence of a confidence channel in the international transmission of shocks, as U.S. confidence indices help predicting consumer sentiment in the euro area.
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| 2. |
- Cheung, Maria, 1975-
(författare)
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Education, Gender and Media : Empirical Essays in Development Economics
- 2013
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The first essay, Edutainment Radio, Women’s Status and Primary School Participation: Evidence from Cambodia, investigates whether exposure to education-entertainment radio leads to improved women's status and primary school participation. Results show significant behavioral effects related to women's decision-making power and investments in children's primary schooling in exposed areas. Suggestive evidence indicates that gender-related attitudes were affected as well, which is a stepping stone towards changing socially constructed gender norms. The second essay, Who Benefits from Free Education? Long-Term Evidence from a Policy Experiment in Cambodia, investigates the effects of abolishing primary school fees. One additional year of free education had no impact on poor children, but increased the educational attainment for non-poor children. Persistent local educational norms and income segregation may explain why poor students were less likely to progress and complete the higher grades. The third essay, Does Female Education Postpone Fertility? Evidence from a Policy Experiment in Cambodia, investigates the role of female education as a vehicle to postpone early childbearing. Exploiting a policy experiment with differential impact on education, the findings suggest that women who gained more education were associated with fewer births and a postponement of early fertility while no changes in early fertility were observed for unaffected women. The fourth essay, The Impact of a Food for Education Program on Schooling in Cambodia, evaluates three types of FFE interventions gradually implemented in primary schools. Results show that enrollment increased sharply in the short-run but did not lead to higher educational achievements, plausible due to a countervailing class size effect. While these interventions are cost-effective to attract children to school, adjusting school resources accordingly may be important to promote a long-term learning as well.
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| 3. |
- Ekström, Mathias, 1982-
(författare)
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Cues, Conformity, and Choice Architecture : Empirical Essays on Influence
- 2013
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis consists of three papers summarized as follows. “Can Indifference Make the World Greener?” We test whether the default option can nudge people to save resources in a simple, non-dynamic, decision task with only two alternatives, and where people have been explicitly informed about the recommended course of action. In a natural field experiment we switch printers’ default option, from one-sided to two-sided printing, at a random point in time. The results confirm that roughly one third of all printing is determined by the default alternative, and a green default therefore saves resources on average about 15 percent. “Is Liking Contagious?” In this paper we set up a natural field experiment on the social networking service Facebook to study whether people are more prone to Like a status update if someone else has done so before. We distinguish between three treatments: (i) one unknown person Likes the update, (ii) three unknown persons Like the update and (iii) the most connected person Likes the update. Whereas the first condition had no effect, the latter two more than doubled the probability to press the Like button, implying that both the number of predecessors and social proximity matters. Neither limited attention, nor observational learning, is consistent with the results. Conformity is therefore the most plausible mechanism behind our finding. “Do Watching Eyes Affect Charitable Giving? Evidence from a Field Experiment” The presence of implicit observation cues, such as picture of eyes, has been shown to increase generosity in dictator games, and cooperative behavior in field settings. In this paper I test if a picture of watching eyes affects unconditional giving in a natural environment, where the recipient is a charity organization. This setting avoids: (i) experimenter demand effects, (ii) that the facial cue reminds subjects of a human counterpart, and (iii) a social multiplier effect. I find no general effect, but during days when relatively few other people visited a store the picture of eyes increased donated amount by 30 percent. This result indicates that subtle social cues can invoke reputation concerns in humans.
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| 4. |
- Engström, Gustav, 1977-
(författare)
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Essays on Economic Modeling of Climate Change
- 2012
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Structural change in a two-sector model of the climate and the economy introduces issues concerning substitutability among goods in a two-sector economic growth model where emissions from fossil fuels give rise to a climate externality. Substitution is modeled using a CES-production function where the intermediate inputs differ only in their technologies and the way they are affected by the climate externality. I derive a simple formula for optimal taxes and resource allocation over time and highlight model sensitivity w.r.t the elasticity of substitution and distribution parameters.Energy Balance Climate Models and General Equilibrium Optimal Mitigation Policies develops a one-dimensional energy balance climate model with heat diffusion and anthropogenic forcing across latitudes driven by global fossil fuel use coupled to an economic growth model. Our results suggest that if the implementation of international transfers across latitudes are not possible or costly, then optimal taxes are in general spatially non-uniform and may be lower at poorer latitudes. Energy Balance Climate Models, Damage Reservoirs and the Time Profileof Climate Change Policy explores optimal mitigation policies through the lens of a latitude dependent energy balance climate model coupled to an economic growth model. We associate the movement of an endogenous polar ice cap with the idea of a damage reservoir being a finite source of climate related damages affecting the economy. The analysis shows that the introduction of damage reservoirs can generate multiple steady states and Skiba points.Assessing Sustainable Development in a DICE World investigates a method for assessing sustainable development under climate change in the Dynamic Integrated model of Climate and the Economy (DICE-2007 model). The analysis shows that the sustainability measure is highly sensitive to the calibration of the inter-temporal elasticity parameter and discount rate of the social welfare function.
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| 5. |
- Laun, Lisa, 1981-
(författare)
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Studies on Social Insurance, Income Taxation and Labor Supply
- 2012
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis consists of five papers, summarized as follows. "Disability Insurance, Population Health, and Employment in Sweden"This paper describes the development of population health and disability insurance utilization for older workers in Sweden and analyzes the relation between the two. We also study the effects of changes in eligibility criteria for older workers. "Does Privatization of Vocational Rehabilitation Improve Labor Market Opportunities? Evidence from a Field Experiment in Sweden"This paper analyzes if privatization of vocational rehabilitation improves labor market opportunities for long-term sick, using a field experiment. We find no differences in employment rates following rehabilitation between individuals who received rehabilitation by private and public providers. "Screening Stringency in the Disability Insurance Program"This paper proposes a strategy for assessing how the inflow to the disability insurance program has been governed over time. We analyze the ex-ante health of new beneficiaries by using ex-post mortality. We find large variation in the relative health of new beneficiaries compared to non-beneficiaries in Sweden over time. "The Effect of Age-Targeted Tax Credits on Retirement Behavior"This paper analyzes the effect of two tax credits for workers above age 65 implemented in Sweden in 2007: an earned income tax credit and a payroll tax credit. I find that the age-targeted tax credits increased employment in the year following the 65th birthday, but the increase was not large enough to offset the implied decrease in tax revenues. "Wage Dynamics and Firm-Level Shocks"This paper proposes a framework for introducing the firm into empirical models of the dynamic income process. The model allows for studying the extent to which firm-level productivity shocks are transmitted to wages. Selection into employment and between jobs is explicitly modeled. We also present a strategy for estimation and identification of the model
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| 6. |
- Odendahl, Christian, 1980-
(författare)
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Parties, Majorities, Incumbencies : Four essays in political economics
- 2013
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis consists of four self-contained essays on political economics. The first paper studies the impact of having one party in government versus a coalition of parties, where the exogenous variation in the type of government stems from close election outcomes. It uses a new algorithm to detect these close elections in multi-party systems to answer this question. Based on data from more than 2,000 municipalities in the German state of Bavaria, it finds that single-party governments spend more, not less as is often concluded in the theoretical and empirical literature. The second paper uses the same method of detecting close elections to extract exogenous variation, but looks at the political power of parties and its effect on tax policies. It finds significant effects of party power that are mostly in line with expectations. The third paper looks at the transition of voters between parties in three consecutive elections for the state parliament in Bavaria, and infers parties’ ideological positions from these transition flows. After estimating the transition matrices with a method based on maximum entropy, it uses these matrices to compute a distance matrix and uses multi-dimensional scaling to place parties in a policy space. The resulting positions of parties are plausible, consistent across both transition periods, and comparable to those estimated with other methods. The final paper studies the heterogeneity in the advantage of incumbent district candidates in German federal and state parliament elections. In particular, it looks at the party in government, and how that affects the incumbency advantage of district candidates. It finds that an incumbency effect only exists (for both major parties) if the center-left SPD is in government, a heterogeneity that is robust across different specifications and jurisdictions.
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| 7. |
- Olsson, Martin, 1978-
(författare)
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Essays on Employment Protection, Private Equity and Spousal Behavior
- 2012
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis consists of four papers, summarized as follows. “Employment Protection and Sickness Absence” An exemption in the Swedish Employment Security Act in 2001 allows employers with at most ten employees to exempt two workers from the seniority rule at times of redundancies. The exemption is found to decrease sickness absence by more than 13% at those establishments that were treated relative to those that were not and this was due to a behavioral, rather than a compositional, effect. “Employment Protection and Parental Childcare” I examine if employment protection affects parental childcare. I estimate that an increased dismissal risk reduces the total days of parental childcare by around six percent. The identification relies on a reform that made it easier for employers in Sweden to dismiss workers in small firms. Both a sorting effect and a behavioral effect can explain the reduced childcare. I also find that temporary parental leave is redistributed within households if only one partner was affected by the reform. “Private Equity and Employees” Using linked employer-employee data from Sweden, a difference-in-difference approach, and 201 private equity buyouts undertaken between 1998 and 2004, we show that unemployment risk declines and labor income increases for employees after a private equity buyout. A plausible explanation is relaxed financial constraints: the effects are strongest in industries dependent on external finance for growth, for non-divisional buyouts, and for buyouts just prior to 2001. “Temporary Disability Insurance and Spousal Labor Supply” We use a reform in the Swedish temporary disability insurance to show that the partner’s benefit level affects spousal labour supply: an eleven percent increase of the partner’s benefit level is estimated to prolong spousal sick spells with around eight percent, which corresponds to an elasticity of sick days with respect to the partner’s benefit of three-quarters of the own labor supply elasticity of unity.
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| 8. |
- Sanctuary, Mark, 1972-
(författare)
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Essays on trade and environment
- 2013
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The thesis comprises four essays examining aspects of international trade and environment."Border carbon adjustments (BCAs) and Strategic Climate Policy" examines how BCA affects government incentives to regulate emissions and trade in a strategic setting and contrasts the impact of a BCA and a tariff: the distinction being that the level of the BCA is a function of the difference in the trade partner's emission taxes whereas the tariff is not. I show that a BCA leverages the exporter's climate policy provided the exporter has little influence over world prices (i.e. export supply elasticity is large) and has a weak climate policy."How does the price of electricity affect imports? A study of Swedish manufacturing firms" examines the heterogeneous effects of a domestic electricity price increase on the structure of imports. We identify the magnitude of the impact of the electricity price increase on the structure of firm imports. Our findings agree with the predictions of our theoretical model."Trade, Transboundary Pollution and Market Size" suggests a new set of theoretical reasons that may help reconcile the contradictory empirical evidence of the impact of trade liberalization on the location of production to countries with weaker pollution policy. Our results suggest that relative market size, the level of trade costs, the ease of abatement, and the degree of product differentiation at the sector level are relevant variables for empirical studies on trade and pollution.Market shares for organic products are typically modest. Yet several consumer surveys find that a majority of respondents would buy substantially more of these products even if they cost more. "What’s holding it back? A study in organic retail coffee purchases" explores reasons for this apparent divergence. The results suggest that the limited overlap between organic and other highly-valued characteristics is one of the most important constraints.
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| 9. |
- Sheard, Nicholas, 1979-
(författare)
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Regional Economics, Trade, and Transport Infrastructure
- 2012
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- “Regional Policy in a Multiregional Setting: When the Poorest are Hurt by Subsidies” Regional subsidies have a positive short-term effect on the recipient regions, but as they alter migration patterns the long-term effects are less clear. This paper demonstrates using a three-region general equilibrium model that subsidising the poorest region may be to its detriment in the long term and thereby increase inter-regional inequality, if the subsidy draws firms from a nearby region that would function better as a production centre. The result has important implications for the design of regional policies, which are often applied simply according to per-capita incomes. “Learning to Export and the Timing of Entry to Export Markets” Standard trade models are essentially static and do not explain why entry to export markets would be delayed after the instant a firm is formed. This paper proposes a model that endogenously generates the timing of entry to new markets through a learning mechanism. Firms in the model gain experience by entering markets, which eases entry to subsequent markets. The mechanism motivates delays in entry to some markets. More productive firms are less sensitive to the learning effect and thus enter markets sooner and begin by exporting to larger markets. These predictions are confirmed using Swedish firm-level data. “Airports and the Production of Goods and Services” This paper estimates the effects of airport infrastructure on local employment in certain sectors, using data from the United States. Airport sizes are instrumented for using the 1944 National Airport Plan of the Civil Aeronautics Administration. Airport size is found to have a positive effect on local employment in tradable services, with an elasticity of approximately 0.1, and a negative effect on manufacturing. There is no measurable effect on non-tradable services. The results are relevant to the evaluation of airport improvement projects, which are often carried out using public funds.
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| 10. |
- Skult, Eva, 1945-
(författare)
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Studies in Saving under Uncertainty
- 2010
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis consists of three essays.In Precautionary Saving under Correlated Risk, I show that the sign of the correlation between the random variables might determine whether saving increases or decreases when risk is introduced. Precautionary saving is thus not confirmed. In the second part of this chapter, the consumer must also allocate her saving between an insurance and an interest-bearing asset. It is shown that switching the sign of correlation changes the optimal insurance ratio and probably also optimal saving.Saving and Portfolio Choice by Mutually Altruistic Consumers treats the effects of mutual altruism between two individuals. Compared to the Utilitarian social optimum there is, on the one hand, a tendency to higher saving and lower risk share resulting from the higher uncertainty of future income in the Nash equilibrium. On the other hand, there is a tendency to lower saving and higher risk share arising from the possibility of a free ride on the generosity of others, named "Samaritan's Dilemma". Analytically, it was not possible to determine the size or the direction of divergences in the choice variables. Numerical examples show that the effect of the Samaritan's Dilemma outweighs the effect of the greater uncertainty of future income in the Nash equilibrium. However, the divergence in saving between the two solutions is rather small.In the literature, uncertain lifetime has been used to explain both unexpectedly low and unexpectedly high saving by the elderly. In The Effect of Uncertain Lifetime on the Saving of the Elderly, risk is introduced into the remaining lifetime and the consequences of a background risk are investigated. Introducing uncertain lifetime into the certainty model results in a slower decumulation of wealth from the date of retirement. On the contrary, introducing uncertain lifetime into a model with uncertain investment income results in a swifter decumulation and an earlier depletion of wealth.
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