| 1. |
- Berggren, Niclas, et al.
(författare)
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Migrants and Life Satisfaction : The Role of the Country of Origin and the Country of Residence
- 2020
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Ingår i: Kyklos. - : Wiley. - 0023-5962 .- 1467-6435. ; 73:3, s. 436-463
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- We investigate how the life satisfaction of migrants is affected by life satisfaction in their background country and in their new country of residence. In particular, we contribute to the literature by differentiating between first- and second-generation immigrants and by differentiating between types of background country. Using data from the European Social Survey on 30,000 immigrants from 200 countries in 32 European countries, we find that for first-generation immigrants, the effect of the average life satisfaction of the background country is strong for migrants from developed countries, smaller for migrants from developing countries and zero for migrants from post-communist countries. Moreover, the effect from the country of residence is strong for all groups, indicating that while most of these immigrants retain ties to or are still under the influence of the culture of the old country, they develop important ties to the new country. However, second-generation immigrants are not influenced by the life-satisfaction of the background country at all, indicating that they are strongly attuned to life in the country in which they were born.
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| 2. |
- Bergh, Andreas, et al.
(författare)
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Does economic freedom boost growth for everyone?
- 2021
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Ingår i: Kyklos. - : Wiley. - 0023-5962 .- 1467-6435. ; 74:2, s. 170-186
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- While the association between economic freedom and long-term economic growth has been well documented, the parallel research literature on the distributional consequences of economic freedom is full of conflicting findings. In this paper, we take a step toward reconciling these two bodies of literature by exploring the within-quintile growth consequences of changes in three separate elements of economic freedom: the size of government, institutional quality and and policy quality. Although the distributional consequences of increases in economic freedom are theoretically ambiguous, we find evidence that economic freedom affects all parts of the income distribution equally, in addition to indications that the growth effects are largest for the poorest and richest quintiles.
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| 3. |
- Bergh, Andreas, et al.
(författare)
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Historical trust levels predict current welfare state size
- 2011
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Ingår i: Kyklos. - : Wiley. - 0023-5962. ; 64:1, s. 1-19
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Despite the fact that large welfare states are vulnerable to free-riding, the idea that universal welfare states lead to higher trust levels in the population has received some attention and support among political scientists recently. This paper argues that the opposite direction of causality is more plausible, i.e. that populations with higher trust levels are more prone to creating and successfully maintaining universal welfare states with high levels of taxation where publicly financed social insurance schemes. The hypothesis is tested using instrumental variable techniques to infer variations in trust levels that pre-date current welfare states, and then using the variation in historical trust levels to explain the current size and design of the welfare state, and finally comparing the explanatory power of trust to other potential explanatory factors such as left-right ideology and economic openness. To infer variation about historical trust levels, we use three instruments, all used previously in the trust literature: the grammatical rule allowing pronoun-drop, average temperature in the coldest month and a dummy for constitutional monarchies. Using cross-sectional data for 77 countries, we show that these instruments are valid and that countries with higher historical trust levels have significantly higher public expenditure as a share of GDP and also have more regulatory freedom. This finding is robust to controlling for several other potential explanations of welfare state size.
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| 4. |
- Bergh, Andreas, et al.
(författare)
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Social and Legal Trust: The Case of Africa
- 2021
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Ingår i: Social Trust. - 9781003029786 - 9780367458454 ; , s. 9-28
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This essay examines the common empirical connection between trust in people in general (social trust) and trust in the courts and the police (so-called legal trust). In much of the world there is a strong correlation between social trust and legal trust, which is sometimes interpreted as a causal connection from legal trust to social trust. But in many African countries, the correlation breaks down. We hypothesize that this is because many citizens of African countries do not see legal officials as representative of the general public, as illustrated by variation in legal trust with the form of colonialism some African countries endured, French Colonialism in particular. This result suggests that social and legal trust are connected only when legal officials are seen as representative of most members of society. Our interpretation suggests that legal trust is a function of social trust, but not necessarily the other way around.
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| 5. |
- Bergh, Andreas, et al.
(författare)
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Trust Us to Repay: Social Trust, Long-Term Interest Rates, and Sovereign Credit Ratings
- 2021
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Ingår i: Journal of Money, Credit and Banking. - : Wiley. - 1538-4616 .- 0022-2879. ; 53:5
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper asks whether the sensitivity of market long-term interest rates and credit ratings is associated with cross-country differences in social trust. We note a number of theoretical mechanisms that suggest that macroeconomic shocks are more likely to be effectively dealt with in higher-trust societies. A set of panel estimates across middle- and high-income countries reveals that interest rates and credit ratings are substantially more sensitive to inflation and growth problems in low-trust countries. This finding sheds light on the differential market reactions to macroeconomic problems in seemingly comparable countries.
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| 6. |
- Gidehag, Anton Nyrenström, 1990-
(författare)
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Understanding Firm Behavior : The Role of Recruitments and Institutional Reforms
- 2020
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The topic of this thesis is firm behavior and how it is shaped by institutional changes and firms’ recruitment decisions.The first essay studies how the recruitment decisions made by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) affect their subsequent productivity development. Previous studies have shown that being able to recruit employees with complementary skills is associated with skill improvement among incumbent personnel, suggesting that new recruits promote productivity through knowledge spillovers. Using matched employer-employee data, we find that recruiting personnel from large multinational firms can be instrumental for the performance of SMEs.In the second essay, we evaluate the labor market effects of the 2007 Swedish youth payroll reform. This reform generated considerable labor cost savings for firms, related to their pre-reform number of young employees. We study the effects of these savings on firms’ subsequent employment growth and wage development. Our findings suggest that a total of 18,100 jobs were created over the period 2006-2008 and that the savings were partially used to increase the total wages for incumbent employees.The third essay utilizes the 2007 Swedish youth payroll reform to analyze whether general labor cost reductions enhance labor market opportunities for non-western immigrants. In contrast to targeted and time-limited wage subsidies for immigrants, which have frequently been used in the past, these savings were not tied to a specific group or to a certain time period. A strong and positive link between the amount of firms’ labor cost savings and the employment of first-generation non-western immigrants is found.The fourth essay evaluates the efficiency of a staff register reform introduced within the Swedish restaurant and hairdresser industries in 2007. The aim of this reform was to prevent firms from deliberately understating their wage payments and, thereby, evading taxes. We estimate the effect of the staff register reform on wages per employee and find wage increases of 2.17-10.2 percent per incumbent employee at restaurant firms during the four years following the introduction of the reform. Through a revenue-cost comparison, we compare the estimated gain in tax revenues to the total costs borne by firms and the tax authority. Our findings imply that the total costs exceed the tax revenues, suggesting that this reform is unlikely to be economically justified.
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| 7. |
- Niclas, Bergggren, et al.
(författare)
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The growth effects of institutional instability
- 2012
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Ingår i: Journal of Institutional Economics. - 1744-1382. ; 8:2, s. 187-224
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- We study the effects of institutional instability on growth. Using principal components analysis, we construct measures of institutional quality and instability from the political risk index of the International Country Risk Guide. A panel-data analysis of 132 countries during 1984–2004 reveals that institutional quality, especially with regard to the legal system and the protection of property rights, is positively linked to growth. As for institutional instability, we find evidence of a positive relationship in rich countries but a negative link in poor countries, suggesting that instability may reduce problems of institutional sclerosis in the former and that instability primarily entails an increase in transactions costs and uncertainty in the latter.
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| 8. |
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