| 1. |
- Almerud, Jakob, 1984-
(författare)
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Public Policy, Household Finance and the Macroeconomy
- 2018
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The thesis contains four separate essays, spanning questions of the interaction between public policy, household finance and the macroeconomy. How does public policy affect macroeconomic outcomes, and the choices and welfare of households, and what are households’ optimal financial responses to changes in macroeconomic environments? Furthermore, the thesis includes a development of a method, which is helpful to answer questions like the ones stated above. The first essay, Optimal Public Policy in a Multi-Sector Economy with Asymmetric Shocks, shows how fiscal policy can complement monetary policy. It is shown that fiscal policy can be used to improve macroeconomic outcomes and make the economy more efficient. Since fiscal policy, in general, includes more instruments than monetary policy, it is possible to neutralize several frictions in the economy simultaneously. This is shown in a general equilibrium model with dynastic households, where firms face monopolistic competition, sticky prices, productivity shocks and cost-push shocks. The second essay, On the Design of Mortgage Default Legislation, asks how different types of mortgage contracts interact with different types of mortgage default policies regarding the probability of a default on home-owner’s mortgage. The different types of mortgage contracts analyzed are fixed rate annuity mortgages, adjustable rate amortized mortgages and adjustable rate non-amortized mortgages. The mortgage default policies span from non-recourse (where the mortgage lender takes all the default risk) to full recourse (where the borrower takes all the default risk). It is shown that a “borrower friendly” non-recourse policy is, as the one implemented in many parts of the United States, not necessarily borrower friendly due to its effect on the risk premium. This is investigated in a model with finitely lived households and an endogenous risk premium. The third essay, On The Empirical Relevance of Cointegration Between Stock Market Returns and Labor Income on Optimal Portfolio Choice, investigates how finitely lived households optimally choose a portfolio consisting of risk-free bonds and risky equity, and how this choice is affected by the long-run correlation between risky (cumulative) equity returns and stochastic labor income. More specifically, I investigate if the empirical cointegration (long-run correlation) between the two variables is strong enough to affect the optimal portfolio choice. It is shown that it is not. Cointegration exists between the two variables, but the speed-of-adjustment back to the cointegration equilibrium is to slow to have a significant effect on the households’ optimal portfolios. The fourth essay, Solving Dynamic Programming Problems Using Stochastic Grids and Nearest-Neighbor Interpolation, describes a new computational method, which is used in the second and third essays. The method is developed to solve models with finitely lived households who face a complex economic environment. Post-state decision rules for the households are used together with simulated stochastic grids over the exogenous variables. By simulating the grids it is possible to reduce the number of grid points that the model is solved for, thereby making it significantly faster to solve models with many exogenous state variables. It is shown that it is possible to solve non-linear life-cycle models including at least eight state variables relatively quickly on a standard desktop computer.
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| 2. |
- Cao, Mengyi, 1984-
(författare)
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Labor, Trade and Finance : Essays in Applied Economics
- 2017
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Essay I: Credit Constraint and College Attendance. This paper shows that housing wealth alleviate credit constraints for potential college attendees by enabling home owners to extract equity from their property and invest it in the education. Using a large US individual-level survey dataset over the 1996-2011 period, I find that one standard deviation increases of housing prices translate into approximately 72,000 more students enrolled in college each year. My results stay significant when I use proxies for aggregate housing demand shocks and for the topological elasticity of housing supply to generate variation in home equity that is assumed to be orthogonal to decision of going to college.Essay II: Income Inequality and Trade.Does trade with unskilled labor-abundant countries reduce the relative wages of U.S. unskilled labor and consequently cause increased income inequality across industries and regions? Empirical studies in the 1990s found only a modest effect. In this paper, I re-consider the question by using the income inequality measures constructed from Current Population Survey (CPS) data and analyzing the effect of rising Chinese import competition between 1993 and 2007 on US local labor markets. I find that areas which are more exposed to China imports competition have larger changes in income inequality. In my main specification, a $1,000 exogenous decadal rise in a MSA's import exposure per worker leads to a 1.5% increase in the logistic Gini. This re-distributive effect is more profound among non-college educated workers in manufacturing sectors. Essay III: Employee as Creditor: Evidence from Defined Pension Plans.In this paper, I show the role of pension plans in shaping the firms' labor market decision. By employing the loan covenants violation and consequently transferring of control rights to creditors, I examine the strategic use of pension underfunding by firms and the resultant wage cuts. I also find that the wage concession is less severe for firms from industry with bigger bargaining power. This study sheds light on how firms strategically renegotiate labor contracts to extract concessions from labor. The evidence suggests that credit contracts between debt-holders and shareholders have spillover effects on non-financial stakeholders.
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| 3. |
- Fausch, Jürg, 1982-
(författare)
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Essays on Financial Markets and the Macroeconomy
- 2017
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Asset pricing implications of a DSGE model with recursive preferences and nominal rigidities. I study jointly macroeconomic dynamics and asset prices implied by a production economy featuring nominal price rigidities and Epstein-Zin (1989) preferences. Using a reasonable calibration, the macroeconomic DSGE model is consistent with a number of stylized facts observed in financial markets like the equity premium, a negative real term spread, a positive nominal term spread and the predictability of stock returns, without compromising the model's ability to fit key macroeconomic variables. The interest rate smoothing in the monetary policy rule helps generate a low risk-free rate volatility which has been difficult to achieve for standard real business cycle models where monetary policy is neutral. In an application, I show that the model provides a framework for analyzing monetary policy interventions and the associated effects on asset prices and the real economy.Macroeconomic news and the stock market: Evidence from the eurozone. This paper is an empirical study of excess return behavior in the stock market in the euro area around days when important macroeconomic news about inflation, unemployment or interest rates are scheduled for announcement. I identify state dependence such that equity risk premia on announcement days are significantly higher when the interests rates are in the vicinity of the zero lower bound. Moreover, I provide evidence that for the whole sample period, the average excess returns in the eurozone are only higher on days when FOMC announcements are scheduled for release. However, this result vanishes in a low interest rate regime. Finally, I document that the European stock market does not command a premium for scheduled announcements by the European Central Bank (ECB).The impact of ECB monetary policy surprises on the German stock market. We examine the impact of ECB monetary policy surprises on German excess stock returns and the possible reasons for such a response. First, we conduct an event study to asses the impact of conventional and unconventional monetary policy on stock returns. Second, within the VAR framework of Campbell and Ammer (1993), we decompose excess stock returns into news regarding expected excess returns, future dividends and future real interest rates. We measure conventional monetary policy shocks using futures markets data. Our main findings are that the overall variation in German excess stock returns mainly reflects revisions in expectations about dividends and that the stock market response to monetary policy shocks is dependent on the prevailing interest rate regime. In periods of negative real interest rates, a surprise monetary tightening leads to a decrease in excess stock returns. The channels behind this response are news about higher expected excess returns and lower future dividends.
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| 4. |
- Jansson, Joakim, 1986-
(författare)
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We are (not) anonymous : Essays on anonymity, discrimination and online hate
- 2018
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Haters gonna hate? - Anonymity, misogyny and hate against foreigners in online discussions on political topics. A crucial aspect of freedom of expression is anonymity, but anonymity is a contentious matter. It enables individuals to discuss without fear of repercussions, but anonymity can also lead to hateful writings threatening other's freedom. In this paper, we predict hateful content as well as estimate the causal link between anonymity and hateful content in civic discussions online. First, we make use of a supervised machine-learning model to predict hate in general, hate against foreigners and hate against females and feminists on a dominating Swedish Internet discussion forum. Second, using a difference-in-difference model we show that an exogenous decrease in anonymity leads to less hateful content in general hate and hate against foreigners, but an increase in hate against females and feminists. The mechanisms behind the changes is a combination of a decrease in writing hateful, as well as a decrease in writing in general and a substitution of hate against one group to another.Gender grading bias at Stockholm University: quasi-experimental evidence from an anonymous grading reform. In this paper, we first present novel evidence of grading bias against women at the university level. This is in contrast to previous results at the secondary education level. Contrary to the gender composition at lower levels of education in Sweden, the teachers and graders at the university level are predominantly male. Thus, an in-group bias mechanism could consistently explain the evidence from both the university and secondary education level. However, we find that in-group bias can only explain approximately 20 percent of the total grading bias effect at the university level.Anticipation Effects of a Board Room Gender Quota Law: Evidence from a Credible Threat in Sweden. Board room quota laws have recently received an increasing amount of attention. However, laws are typically anticipated and firms can react before the effective date. This paper provides new results on female board participation and firm performance in Sweden due to a credible threat of a quota law enacted by the Swedish deputy prime minister. The threat caused a substantial and rapid increase in the share of female board members in firms listed on the Stockholm stock exchange. This increase was accompanied by an increase in different measures of firm performance in the same years, which were related to higher sales and lower labor costs. The results highlight that anticipatory effects of a law could be detrimental to the analysis.Differences in prison sentencing between the genders and immigration background in Sweden: discrepancies and possible explanations. I use data on punished drunk drivers to document differences in sentencing for the same crime between immigrants and native born and males and females respectively. Differences in past criminal activity or other individual observables can not explain the difference in sentencing. Instead, the difference between immigrants and native born seem to be due to statistical discrimination, while differences in recidivism rates might explain the gender difference. However, the higher incarceration rate for immigrants does not reduce their future number of crimes.
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| 5. |
- Johan, Egebark, 1980-
(författare)
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Taxes, Nudges, and Conformity : Essays in Labor and Behavioral Economics
- 2015
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis consists of four papers summarized as follows.Do Payroll Tax Cuts Raise Youth Employment? We study whether payroll tax reductions are an effective means to raise youth employment. In 2007, the Swedish employer-paid payroll tax was cut on a large scale for young workers, substantially reducing labor costs for this group. Using the variation in payroll taxes across cohorts, we estimate a significant, but small, impact both on employment and on wages.Effects of Taxes on Youth Self-Employment and Income. I examine the link between taxes and youth self-employment. I make use of a Swedish reform that made the payroll tax and the self-employment tax vary by age. The results suggest that youth self-employment is insensitive to tax reductions, both in the short run and in the somewhat longer run. For those defined as self-employed, I find positive effects on income from self-employment, and negative effects on income from wage employment.Can Indifference Make the World Greener? We conducted a natural field experiment at a large university in Sweden to evaluate the effects of two resource conservation programs. The first intervention consisted of a campaign that actively tried to convince people to cut back on printing in general, and to use double-sided printing whenever possible. The second intervention exploited people's tendency to stick with pre-set alternatives. At random points in time we changed the printers’ default settings, from single-sided to double-sided printing. Whereas the moral appeal had no impact, the default change cut paper use by 15 percent.The Origins of Behavioral Contagion: Evidence from a Field Experiment on Facebook. We explore the micro-level foundations of behavioral contagion by running a natural field experiment on the networking site Facebook. Members of Facebook express positive support to content on the website by clicking a Like button. We show that users are more prone to support content if someone else has done so before.
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| 6. |
- Kessel, Dany, 1982-
(författare)
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School Choice, School Performance and School Segregation : Institutions and Design
- 2018
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis consists of four self-contained chapters. The first chapter, Are Parents Uninformed? – The Impact of School Performance Information on School Choice Behavior and Student Assignment, is co-authored by Elsisabet Olme. We investigate the effects of school performance information on school choice behavior and student assignment. A randomly selected group of students, about to choose middle school, were provided with information about the performance of the available schools. Households that received the information became more prone to choose a top-performing school. This effect is driven by native and high-skilled households. We simulate how this change in choice behavior translates into changes in school assignment. We find that enrollment in the top-performing schools increases but the effect is muted by limited capacity. We also find that the treatment increases the gap in school performance between advantaged and disadvantaged households, decreases segregation in terms of migration background and increases segregation in terms of parental skill-level. The second chapter, School Choice Priority Structures and School Segregation, is also co-authored by Elsisabet Olme. We evaluate how school segregation is affected by altering the priority structures in a school choice program. We evaluate three priority structures, one proximity-based, one lottery-based and one based on soft quotas. Using actual choice data and simulations we find that that priority structures do affect school segregation. When reserving seats for different groups, schools are less segregated compared to when using systems where priorities are based on proximity or a lottery. We find that the average costs in terms of welfare are limited but that the different priority structures benefit different subgroups. In the third chapter, Debiasing the Gender Differences in Willingness to Compete – The Effects of General Information on the Gender Gap and Efficiency, I explore if informing people about the gender differences in the willingness to compete and the accompanying inefficiencies can reduce said differences and inefficiencies. In an experiment where the participants got to choose whether to compete or not, a random sample of participants were informed about the gender differences in willingness to compete and the related inefficiencies. Among those not informed, men were much more likely to compete than women. There were also significant inefficiencies from low-performing men choosing to compete and high-performing women choosing not to. The treatment reversed the gender gap and significantly reduced inefficiency. The fourth chapter, The Housing Wealth Effect: Quasi-Experimental Evidence is co-authored by Roine Vestman and Björn Tyrefors Hinnerich. We exploit a quasi-experiment that occurred in Stockholm in 2007 when the contract of Stockholm's city airport was unexpectedly renewed. We estimate an immediate shock of approximately 16 percent to house prices close to the airport. This source of price variation is ideal to identify housing wealth effects since it is local and unrelated to variation in macroeconomic conditions. Using a household data set with granular geographic information on primary residence, we find an MPC on cars of less than 0.2 cents per dollar.
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| 7. |
- Knutsson, Daniel, 1981-
(författare)
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Public Health Programmes, Healthcare and Child Health
- 2018
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis consists of three self-contained chapters.Modern Medicine, Public Policy and Infant Health: Evidence from a Preventive Health Programme in Sweden. This paper explores a universal preventive health programme targeting infants that coincided in time with the introduction and availability of an early antibiotic, sulfa. As sulfa only affects infant mortality by reducing pneumonia, the effect of medicine distribution through the program can largely be separated from preventive health inputs. I find that access to the program reduced infant mortality by 7 per cent, which can entirely be attributed to reduced mortality in pneumonia among infants. I find no effect on other infectious diseases. This means that the program was mainly effective through the spread and use of sulfa, facilitated by regular physician contacts and a decentralised health organisation. These findings suggest that universal infant monitoring can be an effective way of providing healthcare to groups with low access to healthcare. However, these gains did not translate to any detectable long-term benefits in health or labour market outcomes.Urban Water Improvement and Health: Evidence from the Early Stages of Industrialisation. Water and sewerage technologies can explain much of the decline in urban mortality during the early 20th century. However, the importance of information on how to use these technologies effectively for positive health effects is still unclear. This paper analyses how water technologies affected health when information on the communicability of infectious diseases was not available. The city of Stockholm introduced a water cleaning system and piped distribution network in 1861, enabling parts of the population in-house access. The historical context allows me to analyse these technologies without sewerage access as no major sewerage system was constructed at the same time. Water cleaning and piped distribution had a large positive impact on health, even without sewerages. However, the effect on infant mortality is smaller and less precise. Infants and small children could therefore be more sensitive than adults to inefficient use of the water technologies due to information constraints.Hospital Crowding and Quality: Evidence from Swedish Delivery Care Units. How hospitals can improve quality has been empirically difficult to establish. I explore resources in delivery care in Sweden as a possible margin for improvement by assessing the relationship between delivery-care crowding and health. Comparing crowded days to average patient volume, I find large effects on neonatal mortality. However, the effect on neonatal mortality is only apparent in large cities, where I find evidence that capacity constraints bind more often. In large city hospitals, crowding is associated with around 50 per cent higher risk of an infant dying in her first month of life. This effect is unrelated to if hospitals have neonatal intensive care units or not. Furthermore, I find that emergency caesarean sections are delayed at times of crowding and argue that delayed medical treatments due to capacity constraints is the most plausible explanation for the findings. These results suggest that there is scope for quality improvements in delivery care at times of high demand.
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| 8. |
- 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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| 9. |
- 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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| 10. |
- Pateli, Evangelia, 1983-
(författare)
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Essays on International Trade : Theory and Evidence on the Determinants and Implications of Firms' Import Behaviour
- 2018
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis aspires to further contribute to our understanding of both the determinants as well as the implications of intermediate goods trade. Faced with intensifying global competition, firms are increasingly developing their production process and their sourcing strategies beyond national borders in order to take advantage of lower costs, superior quality and technological advances.In the first two chapters, I analyse firm-level import decisions in an environment allowing for unintentional exchanges of import-relevant information between firms. I build on the idea that any import-specific knowledge acquired by established importers, in a given region/industry, spills over to prospective importers lowering the costs associated with entry in international markets for intermediates. Chapter 1, using firm-level import data on the universe of Swedish firms, at the product level and by source market for the period 1998-2011, provides evidence for the existence of import spillovers and offers insights into the mechanisms through which they operate. Chapter 2, sets out a theoretical framework formalising import spillovers and their implications for the firm’s import behaviour and for consumer welfare.In the third and last chapter of this thesis, I turn to intermediate import dependence with an aim to explain the lack of sensitivity of trade flows to exchange rate movements. I propose a tractable framework and study how real devaluations affect firm-level export decisions and export performance, as well as aggregate exports and welfare in an environment where final goods production uses both domestic and imported intermediates.
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