| 31. |
- Lindgren, Erik, 1981-
(författare)
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One coin - One vote : the rural political power shift that pushed Sweden towards industrialization
- 2022
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The Causal Effect of Political Power on the Provision of Public Education: Evidence from a Weighted Voting SystemWe estimate how political power affects the provision of public education in local governments, using data from a nondemocratic society where voters received votes in proportion to their taxable income. This was the system used in Swedish local governments during the period 1862–1909. We use two different identification strategies, a threshold regression analysis and a generalized event-study design, both of which exploit nonlinearities or discontinuities in the effect of political power between two opposing local elites: agricultural landowners and emerging industrialists. The results suggest that school spending is approximately 90–120% higher if the non-agrarian interest controls all of the votes compared to when landowners have a majority.The Causal Effect of Transport Infrastructure: Evidence from a New Historical DatabaseWe analyze the effect of railroad investments on economic growth and find large effects of having access to railways. For real non-agricultural income, the cumulative treatment effect is approximately 130% after 30 years. We also show that the effect is likely to reflect growth rather than a reorganization of existing economic activity since no spillover effects between treated and untreated regions are found. Our results are consistent with the big push hypothesis that argues that simultaneous and coordinated investment can generate economic growth if there are strong aggregate demand externalities. We corroborate this mechanism by using plant-level data and find that investments in local railways significantly increase local industrial production and employment.The Political Economics of Growth, Labor Control and Coercion: Evidence from a Suffrage Reform Here we analyze the breadth of Sweden’s industrial, economic and social development from the 1860s to the 1910s. By using a novel constructed historical dataset of approximately 2,400 Swedish local governments we find that the change in suffrage affected several outcomes at the local level. These outcomes include factor price manipulation in the form of entry barriers such as investments in local public education and transportation; technology adoption and labor productivity in agriculture and industry; changes in the real wage structure, composition of employment, and the structure of production; organized labor and labor coercion; demographic transition; and persistence in dysfunctional local political institutions. Our results support the idea that political institutions are a key determinant of long-term development and growth. Precipitation and Infant Mortality: Evidence from Sweden 1881–1950I analyze the dynamic effects of precipitation on infant mortality, using a panel dataset containing monthly mortality data from approximately 2,150 Swedish parishes and monthly precipitation levels collected at a number of weather stations around the country. Given that I use data from 1881 to 1950, the size of this novel panel dataset is considerable. Parishes have been matched to the closest weather station for every given month. Given that precipitation, is neither binary nor constant, a binned event-study design is used to estimate the dynamic effects with respect to the precipitation intensity. The results show that increased precipitation decreases infant mortality for both male and female infants. The dynamic effect after 4 months is about 8 percent.
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| 32. |
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| 33. |
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| 34. |
- Lorentzon, Louise, 1987-
(författare)
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Empirical Essays on Public Policies : Social Insurances, Safety Nets, and Health Care
- 2020
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Screening Efficiency in Sickness Insurance: Evidence from a Spell Limit ReformI estimate the effects of the removal of a limit on sick leave spells in the Swedish Sickness Insurance program, on labor market outcomes and sick leave. The removal of the spell limit led to longer sick leave spells. I also find that the removal led to a reduction in the share of people who are neither working, nor receiving sickness benefits. A conceptual framework is used to interpret the results in terms of benefits screening efficiency, which is found to increase through the removal of the spell limit. The identification is based on a regression discontinuity design, using the timing of sick leave start dates and the abolition of the spell limit.Long-Term Effects of Cash Transfers: Evidence from a Swedish ReformDo short-term cash transfers to the poor deliver long-term benefits? This paper studies a unique program introduced in Sweden in the 1930s. The program made large transfers – on average approximately 30 percent of total income in the collected sample – to widows with children. Income and family-size thresholds, combined with child age cutoffs, generate plausibly exogenous variation in program exposure. By digitizing and linking historical records to later administrative datasets, I study the long-term effects of this program. Focusing on life expectancy, I find no significant long-term effects; however, the estimates are imprecisely measured due to the limited sample size.Inertia of Dominated Pension Investments: Evidence from an Information InterventionIn this paper we empirically investigate potential causes of imperfect competition in the fund market, as characterized by high price dispersion among comparable funds. We discriminate between three main hypotheses on the demand side: a lack of awareness of price dispersion, search costs, and financial illiteracy. A large-scale field experiment is conducted in the Swedish Premium Pension system. Information letters are sent to pension savers in two index funds, where there exists a cheaper fund with the same index strategy. We show that an information intervention that increases awareness of a cheaper, dominating fund, and reduces search costs to find such an alternative, can significantly improve households’ real investment allocations. Nonetheless, a vast majority of savers who are sent information about the name of the dominating fund do not switch funds. Thus, the high degree of inertia in pension investments remains even when search friction for identifying dominating alternatives are eliminated.Midwives and Maternal Mortality: Evidence from a Midwifery Policy Experiment in 19th Century SwedenThis paper estimates the effect of a historical midwifery policy experiment on maternal mortality, infant mortality, and stillbirth during the period from 1830 to 1894 in Sweden. Exploiting sharp changes or “discontinuities” across time and place in the availability of trained and licensed midwives as an exogenous source of variation, we find that a doubling of trained midwives leads to a 20-40 percent reduction in maternal mortality and to a 20 percent increase in the uptake of midwife-assisted homebirths. The results thus suggest that a 1 percent increase in the share of midwife-assisted homebirths decreases maternal mortality by as much as 2 percent, which is a remarkable finding given that midwife training was only 6-12 months at that time. The results of this study contribute to the current debate about the most effective strategy to reduce the unacceptably high rate of maternal mortality in many developing countries, especially in low-resource settings.
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| 35. |
- Malafry, Laurence, 1982-
(författare)
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Inequality and Macroeconomic Policy : Essays on Climate, Immigration and Fiscal Intervention
- 2018
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis consists of four self-contained essays in economics.Optimal Climate Policy with Household Wealth Inequality. Policy makers concerned with setting optimal carbon taxes to address climate change externalities often employ integrated assessment models (IAMs). While these models differ on their assumptions of climate damage impacts, discounting and technology, they conform on their assumption of complete markets and a representative household. In the face of global inequality and significant vulnerability of asset poor households, I relax the complete markets assumption and introduce a realistic degree of global household inequality. A simple experiment of introducing a range of global carbon taxes shows a household's position on the global wealth distribution predicts the identity of their most preferred carbon price.Immigration Shocks, Equilibrium Unemployment and Inequality. The purpose of this paper is to present a proof-of-concept model for assessing the impact of immigration shocks on a country's equilibrium unemployment, wages and inequality. The model implements labour market matching in the workhorse heterogeneous agent macro model with precautionary savings. In this setting, I perform several transition experiments exploring the channels and mechanisms through which a substantial immigration shock affects macroeconomic outcomes, including conditional welfare and economic integration. I find that the identity of the immigration cohort, as well as, features of the receiving economy matter for both the magnitude and direction of the response.Fiscal Multipliers in the 21st Century. Fiscal multipliers appear to vary greatly over time and space. Based on VARs for a large number of countries, we document a strong correlation between wealth inequality and the magnitude of fiscal multipliers. In an attempt to account for this finding, we develop a life-cycle, overlapping-generations economy with uninsurable labor market risk. We calibrate our model to match key characteristics of a number of OECD economies, including the distribution of wages and wealth, social security, taxes, and government debt and study how a fiscal multiplier depends on various country characteristics. We find that the fiscal multiplier is highly sensitive to the fraction of the population who face binding credit constraints and also to the average wealth level in the economy. These findings together help us generate a cross-country pattern of multipliers that is quite similar to that in the data.Fiscal Consolidation Programs and Income Inequality. Following the Great Recession, many European countries implemented fiscal consolidation policies aimed at reducing government debt. Using three different empirical approaches, we document a strong positive relationship between higher income inequality and stronger recessive impacts of fiscal consolidation. To explain this finding, we develop a life-cycle, overlapping generations economy with uninsurable labor market risk. We calibrate our model to match key characteristics of a number of European economies, including the distribution of wages and wealth, and study the effects of fiscal consolidation programs. We find that higher income risk induces precautionary savings behavior, which decreases the proportion of credit-constrained agents in the economy. Our model produces a cross-country correlation between inequality and the fiscal consolidation multipliers in line with the data.
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| 36. |
- Molla, Kiflu Gedefe, 1978-
(författare)
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Essays in International trade, exchange rates and prices
- 2017
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis consists of three self-contained essays in International Trade, Exchange Rates and Prices. Although independent, these essays share some common themes. The first two papers can be related to the vast literature on exchange rate pass-through to prices. While the first paper uses firm-product level data from Sweden to study firms’ export price response to movements in exchange rate, the second paper employs aggregate level data from Ethiopia and looks at the issue from the importers’ perspective. The third paper, like the first paper, uses Swedish firm-level data and investigates firms’ exporting behavior. The third paper, however, specifically focuses on export margins of multi-product firms and studies their response when exporting to destinations of different size and distance from the home country.
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| 37. |
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| 38. |
- Norbäck, Pehr-Johan, 1960-
(författare)
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Multinational Firms, Technology and Location
- 1998
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis consists of four essays. Its main theme is the location of production in multinational firms.Subsidizing away exports? -- A note on strategic trade policy}% , investigates how strategic trade policy arguments for R\&D subsidies are altered when firms are multinational rather than national. Using a standard model, where a home firm and a foreign firm compete in exports on an international market, it is shown that cost-reducing R\&D subsidies by the home government to the home firm indeed increase this firm's market share. However, the subsidy can also eliminate export production in the home country, as production is shifted abroad.Strategic R\&D policy, domestic unionization and multinational firms}, extends the model in the first essay to include labor market effects. Labor is unionized in the home firm and wage and employment are derived using the efficient Nash-Bargaining solution. In this environment, R\&D subsidies will also improve the firm's bargaining position against the union, as the improved technology can be used abroad in the case of a break-down of negotiations, when production is shifted abroad. Whether this effect increases the firm's market share and domestic welfare depends on union preferences.Multinational firms, technology and location} generalizes the above model into a full three-stage game where both firms choose (i) their respective technology, by deciding on a level of R\&D, (ii) whether this technology is to be used in a domestic or a in local plant and (iii) the quantity produced and sold on the market. If technology transfer costs are fixed, ``high-tech'' firms tend to produce abroad, but if such costs are associated with the level of R\&D, high-tech firms tend to export. An empirical analysis using a data set of Swedish multinational firms, confirms the latter prediction.Cumulative effects of labor market distortions in a developing country} considers a small open economy where an input-output industrial structure, scale economies and imperfect competition, create vertical linkages and multiple equilibria. In this environment, an imperfect labor market is introduced by assuming unionized labor. It is shown that if the vertical linkages are sufficiently strong, a deregulation of the labor market may trigger a large, discontinuous expansion of industrial output, as reduced wage-costs start a circular, cumulative process in which the expansions of the up-and downstream industries promote each other.
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| 39. |
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| 40. |
- 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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