| 1. |
- Pettersson, Per, 1952-
(författare)
-
Do we really need special regulation of religion?
- 2023
-
Ingår i: Contemporary challenges to the regulation of religions in Europe. - Porto, Portugal : U. Porto Press. - 9789897463600 ; , s. 85-95
-
Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Europe has historically developed from state related monopoly churches controlling and regulating religion, to secular religiously neutral states with individual freedom of religion. In parallel Europe has continuously become more religiously and culturally diverse by globalisation, migration, travel etc. As part of increasing religious pluralism new questions on religion and possible needs for special regulation of religion are brought up in political and juridical context. Simultaneous with increasing use of the concept religion in secular legal context, it is questioned as a useful concept by researchers in religion. The concept religion it is too multifaceted and there is no common universal definition of religion. It is also criticised as being a western European social construction, which makes it especially problematic to use in general policies and common law in a religiously diverse society with many different understandings of “religion”. This chapter discuss the needs and limitations of regulation of religion, and question if secular states really need special regulation of religion. Is it not enough with the same common law for people of all kind of belongings, beliefs, values and practices regardless if they are religious, non-religious, political etc.? The European empirical context is in focus, although the theoretical discussion is largely general.
|
|
| 2. |
- Reinhold, Stephan, et al.
(författare)
-
Post-Pandemic Tourism Development : Navigating Uncertainty in the Visitor Economy
- 2023
-
Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has been presenting stakeholders in the visitor economy with an unprecedented level of uncertainty. Sweden’s approach to handling the pandemic, which is viewed as an international exception, and Småland and Öland with its focus on limited-season summer tourism provide an exceptional context to study how key stakeholders deal with relevant challenges from a decision-making perspective, promising insights beyond the immediate study context.The pandemic has been and still is a chance to (re-)engage with the development trajectories of tourism in this area and what kind of futures various local stakeholders envision for it. To this end, it is valuable to evaluate the impact and response to Covid-19 in relation to developing the local UNESCO World Heritage site and to achieving the UN Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development.The interdisciplinary research project documented in this report sought to study how stakeholders in the visitor economy make sense of the uncertainty induced by the current SARS-CoV-2 pandemic in the short- and long-run through different lenses. To this end, we studied how stakeholders in the visitor economy reflected on their decisions to deal with the immediate implications of pandemic tourism and plan to engage them in a forward-looking process of scenario development and action-learning to open horizons that envision the present crisis as a chance to work towards a more sustainable future.The project results address aspects of how the visitor economy in Småland can deal both with the present uncertainty and future crises of a similar nature. In the short-run, we identified how stakeholders in the local visitor economy made sense of the uncertainty of visitor business during the pandemic. This provides points of reflection for the stakeholders involved and suggestions for policy considerations to support the visitor economy for the future. For the long-run, we enhanced futures thinking and discussed development perspectives with stakeholders in the local visitor economy. This is a necessary input to inspiring strategies towards sustainable development beyond the immediate necessities of the present.
|
|
| 3. |
- Lindgren, Erik, 1981-
(författare)
-
One coin - One vote : the rural political power shift that pushed Sweden towards industrialization
- 2022
-
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.
|
|
| 4. |
- Reinhold, Stephan, et al.
(författare)
-
Managerial sensemaking in tourist destinations : Riding the COVID rollercoaster
- 2022
-
Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- The COVID-19 pandemic presents an unprecedented context of dynamic uncertainty for managerial sensemaking. Reliant on tourists’ and local visitors’ mobility, the travel industry has been particularly hard-hit by the implications of constantly changing regulations, rules, and recommendations as to how and where visitors can travel. Yet, tourism enterprises have not just been facing the worst market conditions in decades; some found themselves experiencing unprecedented demand and pressure nearing overtourism. In this paper, we use these extreme conditions to study underexplored aspects of sensemaking. We present the preliminary results of an interview-based case study of a Swedish tourist destination.
|
|
| 5. |
- Leis-Peters, Annette, et al.
(författare)
-
A Common Spatial Scene? : Young People and Faith-Based Organisations at the Margins
- 2021
-
Ingår i: Stuck in the Margins? Young people and faith-based organisations in South African and Nordic localities<em>. </em>. - Göttingen : Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. - 9783525568552 - 9783666568558 ; , s. 247-265
-
Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This chapter shifts the focus to one of the overarching questions of the book on therole of faith-based organisations (FBOs) in dealing with the plight of young peopleat the margins in the selected South African and Nordic localities. The case studiesshow that FBOs have an important supportive function for many young peopleliving on the margins of society, even though they may play only a limited rolein fighting youth marginalisation in their respective local communities. Only fewFBO activities were directed pointedly at changing the situation of marginalisedyoung people. This does not mean that the FBOs did not help young people inneed; yet how they did this differed considerably between the Nordic and SouthAfrican contexts – and between metropolitan and rural or more remote areas. FBOsfunctioned as a spiritual and social resource, or sometimes even as the last safetynet, hence meeting the most acute existential needs of young people. At the sametime, however, they were not engaged in more systematic attempts to empowermarginalised young people. These similarities, differences and tensions evinced inthe results from the six case studies demanded deeper analysis and interpretation.
|
|
| 6. |
- Lorentzon, Louise, et al.
(författare)
-
Midwives and Maternal Mortality : Evidence from a Midwifery Policy Experiment in 19th-century Sweden
- 2021
-
Ingår i: Journal of the European Economic Association. - : Oxford University Press (OUP). - 1542-4766 .- 1542-4774. ; 19:4, s. 2052-2084
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper estimates the causal effect of a historical midwifery policy experiment on maternal mortality, infant mortality, and stillbirth during the period of 1830-1894 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 led to a 20%-40% reduction in maternal mortality and a 20% increase in the uptake of midwife-assisted homebirths. The results thus suggest that a 1% increase in the share of midwife-assisted homebirths decreased maternal mortality by as much as 2%, 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.
|
|
| 7. |
- Lorentzon, Louise, 1987-
(författare)
-
Empirical Essays on Public Policies : Social Insurances, Safety Nets, and Health Care
- 2020
-
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.
|
|
| 8. |
- Pettersson, Per, 1952-
(författare)
-
Sweden : Silent Religious Retreat as Rehabilitation Treatment in Prison
- 2020
-
Ingår i: Religion and Prison: An Overview of Contemporary Europe. - Cham : Springer Science+Business Media B.V.. ; , s. 359-371
-
Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In this chapter, the Kumla Prison Monastery is discussed as an example of the ambiguous policy and practice of Swedish secular state institutions in relation to the field of religion. Kumla is the largest prison in Sweden, and one of the most protected and secure ones. It holds convicts serving long sentences. This prison conducts a very special activity, probably unique in the world: the ‘Monastery’, which allows convicts to undergo a long silent spiritual retreat, as initiated by Ignatius of Loyola, a sixteenth-century Catholic priest. Although Swedish official policy is that state authorities should be religiously neutral, this use of religion in prison illustrates a certain ambiguity of the Swedish secular state institution.
|
|
| 9. |
|
|
| 10. |
- Pettersson, Per, et al.
(författare)
-
Level set methods for stochastic discontinuity detection in nonlinear problems
- 2019
-
Ingår i: Journal of Computational Physics. - : Elsevier. - 0021-9991 .- 1090-2716. ; 392, s. 511-531
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Stochastic problems governed by nonlinear conservation laws are challenging due to solution discontinuities in stochastic and physical space. In this paper, we present a level set method to track discontinuities in stochastic space by solving a Hamilton-Jacobi equation. By introducing a speed function that vanishes at discontinuities, the iso-zeros of the level set problem coincide with the discontinuities of the conservation law. The level set problem is solved on a sequence of successively finer grids in stochastic space. The method is adaptive in the sense that costly evaluations of the conservation law of interest are only performed in the vicinity of the discontinuities during the refinement stage. In regions of stochastic space where the solution is smooth, a surrogate method replaces expensive evaluations of the conservation law. The proposed method is tested in conjunction with different sets of localized orthogonal basis functions on simplex elements, as well as frames based on piecewise polynomials conforming to the level set function. The performance of the proposed method is compared to existing adaptive multi-element generalized polynomial chaos methods.
|
|
