| 1. |
- Axbard, Sebastian, 1987-
(författare)
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Crime, Corruption and Development
- 2016
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Essay I: Prosecuting and convicting corrupt officials is a common strategy to combat corruption. Despite this, little is known about the effectiveness of such anti-corruption policies. Theoretically it has been argued that convictions might not achieve much in a highly corrupt environment, since incentives are likely to favor persistence of corrupt behavior. This study investigates the causal effect of convicting corrupt local officials by exploiting exogenous variation in the probability of conviction caused by the random assignment of cases to differently strict justices in the Philippines. Results show that convictions affect both who the local leaders are and the policy choices they make. In particular, families lose their monopoly power over the local government and spending is re-directed from general administrative items (e.g. mayoral office) towards public goods provision. In the long run, this leads to fewer corruption cases and a suggestive improvement of governance. An investigation of the mechanism proposes that the information provided by convictions is important in the political process. This illustrates the complimentary role that political and judiciary institutions can have in the fight against corruption.Essay II (with Jonas Poulsen and Anja Tolonen): The role of extractive industries for development is highly debated. A large literature focusing on poor countries with weak institutions has shown that such industries can spur conflict and war by providing appropriable resources. This study investigates whether this relationship persists later in the development process. More specifically, we examine whether the extensive mining industry in South Africa affects local property and violent crime. To estimate the causal effect, our empirical strategy exploits local production changes caused by fluctuations in international mineral prices. In contrast to earlier studies, we find that an increase in mining activity lowers the local crime rate. Several tests suggest that this effect is driven by better income opportunities, affecting the opportunity cost of engaging in criminal activity. In order for this effect to materialize, local institutional quality needs to be sufficiently high. If such conditions are met, the appropriation channel emphasized in the earlier literature is dominated by the change in opportunity costs of crime. Essay III: The effect of climatic variation on conflict and crime is well established, but less is known about the mechanism through which this effect operates. This study contributes to the literature by exploiting a new source of exogenous variation in climate to study the effect of fishermen's income opportunities on sea piracy. Using satellite data to construct a monthly measure of local fishing conditions it is found that better income opportunities reduce piracy. A wide range of approaches are employed to ensure that these effects are driven by income opportunities rather than other mechanisms through which climate could affect piracy.
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| 2. |
- 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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| 3. |
- 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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| 4. |
- Ahrsjö, Ulrika, 1989-
(författare)
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Essays on Economic Disadvantage : Criminal Justice, Gender and Social Mobility
- 2022
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Youth Crime, Community Service and Labor Market OutcomesCan lifetime trajectories of youth offenders be improved through criminal justice policy? I evaluate the effects of a youth justice reform in Sweden that sharply increased the share of juveniles assigned to court-ordered community service --- i.e. unpaid, low-skilled work. On average, the reform did not affect post-conviction recidivism or labor market outcomes, but these average effects mask considerable heterogeneity depending on the most likely alternative sanction. In particular, post-reform recidivism and incarceration rates are lower for individuals for whom community service replaces fines. Applying a machine learning method for causal inference, I then evaluate the net financial effect of the policy conditional on observable characteristics and analyze how the program could be targeted for improved efficiency. The results suggest that community service can benefit youth offenders, but that it is not suitable as a universal program.Intergenerational Mobility Trends and the Changing Role of Female LaborWe present new evidence on the existence and drivers of trends in intergenerational income mobility using administrative income data from Scandinavia along with survey data from the United States. Harmonizing the data from Sweden, Denmark and Norway, we first find that intergenerational rank associations in income have increased uniformly across Scandinavia for cohorts of children born between 1951 and 1979. Splitting the trends by gender, we find that father-son mobility has been stable in all three countries, while correlations involving females display substantial trends. Similar patterns are confirmed in the US data, albeit with slightly different timing. Utilizing information about individual occupation, education and income in the Scandinavian data, we find that intergenerational mobility in latent economic status has remained relatively constant for all gender combinations. This is found to be driven by increased female labor market participation at the intensive as well as the extensive margin. The observed decline in intergenerational mobility in Scandinavia is thus consistent with a socially desirable development where female skills are increasingly valued in the labor market.Wage Inequality, Selection and the Evolution of the Gender Earnings Gap in Sweden We estimate the change in the gender wage gap between 1968 and 2019 in Sweden accounting for (1) changes in the intensive margin of labor supply; (2) changes in the overall wage inequality; (3) changes in selection into the labor market using parametric and non-parametric selection corrections. Our results show that between 1968 and 1991, about half of the changes in the gender wage gap can be attributed to changes in the overall wage distribution. Conversely, changes in the wage distribution from 1991 to 2019 mask a larger closure of the gender wage gap. Our corrections for selection into the labor force suggest that uncorrected estimates miss about half of the around 20 percentage points decrease in the gender wage gap over the 1968-2019 period.Identity in Court Decision-MakingWe explore the role of identity along multiple dimensions in high-stakes decision-making. Our data set contains information about gender, ethnic background, age and socioeconomic indicators for randomly assigned jurors and defendants in a Swedish district court. Our results show that defendants are significantly less likely to get a prison sentence if they and the jurors belong to the same identity-forming group. For example, a defendant is 15 percent less likely to get a prison sentence if he or she has the same level of education as all three jurors compared to if none of them have the same educational attainments.
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| 5. |
- Almén, Daniel, 1984-
(författare)
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Societal Impacts of Modern Conscription : Human Capital, Social Capital and Criminal Behaviour
- 2020
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Opportunity Costs and Conscription: An Unintended Progressive Tax?Throughout history to present days, policymakers, social commentators and others have oftentimes viewed conscription as a natural extension of secondary education, and an important institution for vocational training. This paper uses Swedish administrative data and exploits a reform in 2004, implying a sudden downsizing of the military, to identify the causal effects of peacetime conscription on later labour market outcomes and education. I find that unemployment increased in the short run, and lasted up to four years after service. There are no significant overall effects on income or educational attainment. However, these average effects hide a large heterogeneity. High ability conscripts fall behind their counterparts who did not start military service, both in terms of income and employment. Furthermore, the results suggest that the effect is attributed to high ability conscripts assigned as privates. In contrast, no such evidence is found for conscripts assigned to officer training, despite the fact that all of them have a high ability, and a longer time in service. Plausibly, high ability conscripts have high opportunity costs of doing military service, and the civilian benefits from training as privates are too small to counteract these costs. The results highlight the importance of precise matching of aptitude to type of training or education, an insight that might be generalized to other contexts beyond conscription.Citizenship, Social Capital and the Role of Conscription: Evidence from SwedenMany scholars have argued that conscription has played an important role as a nation-builder throughout history. Today, advocates of conscription often put forward its potential to induce citizenship and civic engagement. This paper addresses this claim by studying the causal effects of military service on civic engagement by using Swedish administrative data on election participation, blood donation, and the payment of a mandatory, but highly evaded, fee to the public broadcasting service. I study two qualitatively very different conscription systems from two different eras in Sweden, yielding a high external validity. To study the effects of universal conscription (almost all healthy and fit men serve) during the early 1990s, I use an empirical strategy similar in spirit to work using randomly assigned judges as an instrument. To identify the effects of selective conscription (a small fraction of motivated and positively selected men serve), I exploit a reform in 2004, implying a sudden downsizing of the military. In contrast to the previous correlational literature, the results show small and insignificant point estimates for all outcomes in both populations studied. Hence, I find no evidence of any causal effects of military service on civic engagement in either a selective-, or in a universal conscription systemThe Effect of Military Conscription on the Formation of Criminal Behaviour: Evidence from a Natural ExperimentConscription has been suggested to be a policy-tool to break young men's anti-social life-trajectories. This paper uses Swedish administrative data and exploits a reform in 2004, implying a sudden downsizing of the military, to identify the causal effects of peacetime conscription on contemporaneous, short- and medium-term crime. I find no evidence of any effects on criminal activity while in service. However, the post-service results show crime increasing effects of military service at the intensive margin (number of convictions), but not at the extensive margin (probability of conviction). The overall crime increasing effect seems to be primarily driven by thefts. This study finds no support for increased overall violent behaviour or that the military context per se induces anti-social behaviour. Rather, some suggestive evidence for worsened labour market opportunities for some groups is documented as a plausible mechanism behind the crime increasing results.
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| 6. |
- 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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| 7. |
- Fogelberg Lövgren, Sara, 1983-
(författare)
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Markets, Interventions and Externalities : Four Essays in Applied Economics
- 2015
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This Ph.D. thesis contains four independent essays summarized as follows. Effects of Competition between Healthcare Providers on Prescription of AntibioticsThe introduction of antibiotics as a medical treatment after World War II helped to dramatically increase life expectancy in the industrialized world. However, over-prescription of antibiotics during the last few decades has led to a sharp increase in multi-resistant bacteria, disarming once powerful anti-pathogens. This paper investigates the effects of increased competition between healthcare providers on prescription of antibiotics. The analysis makes use of a competition-inducing reform implemented in different counties in Sweden at different points in time between 2007 and 2010 for a difference-in-differences approach. Since the dataset contains monthly data on all prescribed antibiotics in Sweden it is possible to estimate the effects on all antibiotics prescribed, as well as on different subcategories of antibiotics. The results show that increased competition had a positive and significant effect on prescription of antibiotics. This increase in prescription of antibiotics was not associated with a reduction in sick leave. Effects of Introducing an HPV Vaccination Program for Daughters on Maternal Participation in Cervical ScreeningPrevious literature has established that there is a positive correlation between maternal participation in screening against cervical cancer and having a daughter vaccinated against types of HPV that can cause cervical cancer. In this paper, we investigate the causal impact of introducing HPV vaccination for girls in a general child vaccination program on maternal participation in screening against cervical cancer. We use a difference-in-differences design and estimate the effect on both general cervical screening participation and heterogeneous effects for women with different levels of education. Strategic Withholding through Production FailuresAnecdotal evidence indicates that electricity producers use production failures to disguise strategic reductions of capacity in order to influence prices, but systematic evidence is lacking. We use an instrumental variable approach and data from the Swedish electricity market to examine such behavior. In a market without strategic withholding, reported production failures should not depend directly on the market price. We show that marginal producers in part base their decision to report a failure on prices, which indicates that production failures are a result of economic incentives as well as of technical problems. Wind Power Volatility and its Impact on Production Failures in the Nordic Electricity MarketWind power generation of electricity has gained popular support because of its low environmental impact and its low costs relative to other renewable energy sources. However, concerns have been raised in the power sector that wind power generation will come at the price of increased damage to other power generators. Wind power generation is naturally volatile which requires other power sources to start up and shut down in accordance with weather conditions, which for instance coal or gas generators are not built for. The previous literature has used simulations to show that the damage done and the associated costs can be substantial. We use a dataset containing all reported failures in the Nordic electricity market Nord Pool and data for Danish wind power generation. The analysis shows that for both Denmark and the rest of Nord Pool the short-term costs associated with the volatility of wind power generation are non-significant.
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| 8. |
- Holzer, Susanna, 1975-
(författare)
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University Choice, Equality, and Academic Performance
- 2009
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis consists of three essays that examine issues on university attendance behavior, factorsof university completion, and the labor market value of a university diploma in Sweden. Essay [I] analyzes how the rapid expansion of higher education that increased the geographicalaccessibility to higher education in the 1990s affected university enrollment decisions amongvarious socioeconomic groups of young adults in Sweden. The empirical findings show that theprobability of enrollment in university education increases with accessibility to universityeducation. The results also indicate that accessibility adds to the likelihood of attending auniversity within the region of residence. Access to higher education more locally seems to havedecreased the social distance to higher education, meaning that the option of attending highereducation, as compared to entering the local labor market after upper secondary school, hasbecome a more common and a more natural alternative for more socioeconomic groups insociety. Essay [II] compares the performance of students in universities built before and after the largedecentralization and expansion of the higher educational system in Sweden, starting in the late1970s. Two outcome measures are used: (i) whether or not the student has obtained a degreewithin seven years after she initiated her studies; and (ii) whether or not she obtained 120 creditpoints (the requirement for most undergraduate degrees) within seven years. Controlling forseveral background variables as well as GPA scores in a binomial probit model, we show thatstudents at old universities are about 5 percentage points more likely to get a degree and about 9percentage points more likely to obtain 120 credit points. However, in an extended bivariatemodel where we consider selection on unobservables into university type, we cannot reject thepossibility of no difference in performance between the two university types. Essay [III] analyzes the labor market value of a university diploma (sheepskin) in Sweden. Incontrast to previous studies, this study only focuses on Swedish university students who havethree years of full time university education or more − where some have obtained a universitydegree, others not. The results show that for male students, the wage premium of possessing adegree, i.e. the sheepskin effect, is roughly 5-8 percent. For women, it is about 6-7 percent forthose who have completed four years of fulltime or more. For students who attended a moreprestigious university in the metropolitan areas in Sweden and majored in the natural sciences, asheepskin effect of roughly 13 percent for men and 22 percent for women is traced. However,this result did not hold among students who attended. Keywords: Higher education, university enrollment; university choice; accessibility; universitycompletion; selection bias; propensity score matching, sheepskin, human capital.
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| 9. |
- Lindahl, Erica, 1977-
(författare)
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Empirical studies of public policies within the primary school and the sickness insurance
- 2008
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Essay 1 (with Elly-Ann Johansson) estimates the effect of attending an MA-class during grades 4-6 on students’ cognitive skills. Using a unique survey with information on students, parents and teachers, we are able to control for many factors that could otherwise bias the results. We find a negative effect on the short-run skills, as measured by grade 6 cognitive tests. In contrast, attending an MA-class in grades 4–6 does not seem to affect longer run school performance as measured by grade 9 credits. Essay 2 compares results on national tests with teachers’ assessment of student performance, by using Swedish data of grade 9 students (16 years old). I examine whether there are systematic differences correlated with gender and ethnic background. The results show that girls are more gen-erously rewarded in teachers’ assessment compared to test results in all three subjects studied. Non-native students are more generously rewarded in teachers’ assessment compared to test results in two out of three sub-jects studied. Essay 3 investigates the importance of gender and ethnic interactions among teachers and students for school performance. School leaving certificates assigned by the teacher is compared with results on compre-hensive national tests. I find that a student is likely to obtain better test scores in Mathematics, when the share of teachers of the same gender as the student increases. Correspondingly, ethnic minority students, on aver-age, obtain better test scores in Mathematics, when the share of ethnic minority teachers increases. The positive same-gender effect on test scores is counteracted by a negative assessment effect. That is, condi-tional on test scores, same-gender teachers are less generous than oppo-site-gender teachers when assessing students’ performance. In Swedish and English no statistically significant effects are found. Essay 4 (with Per Johansson) evaluates a multidisciplinary collaboration programme with the aim to prevent long-term sickness. The selection of eligible candidates was mainly based on register information, implying a good prerequisite of estimating the effects by using the same information. In addition, we have run a small experiment. Both evaluation approaches provide the same result: the programme prolongs rather than shortens the sickness absence spell. The hazard of leaving a sickness absence spell is reduced by on average 22 per cent. Two potential and complementary explanations for these negative results are (i) inefficiency in the organiza-tion outside the programme (i.e., in the rehabilitation process) and (ii) moral hazard in the sickness insurance. Essay 5 (with Per Johansson) evaluates a policy to call sick-listed indi-viduals without permanent employment to information meetings about the rights and duties associated with the sickness insurance system. The evaluation is based on experimental data: a random displacement of when the call is sent out. Comparing the survival functions of the individuals who are called immediately and those whose calls are delayed (by about 30 days) makes it possible to estimate a lower bound of the effect of be-ing called on the sickness absence duration. The result suggests that call-ing a sick-listed individual without permanent employment to an informa-tion meeting reduces the sickness absence duration by at least 23 per cent on average.
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| 10. |
- Nilsson, Maria
(författare)
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Differences and similarities in work absence behavior : - empirical evidence from micro data
- 2005
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis consists of three self-contained essays about absenteeism. Essay I analyzes if the design of the insurance system affects work absence, i.e. the classic insurance problem of moral hazard. Several reforms of the sickness insurance system were implemented during the period 1991-1996. Using Negative binomial models with fixed effects, the analysis show that both workers and employers changed their behavior due to the reforms. We also find that the extent of moral hazard varies depending on work contract structures. The reforms reducing the compensation levels decreased workers’ absence, both the number of absent days and the number of absence spells. The reform in 1992, introducing sick pay paid by the employers, also decreased absence levels, which probably can be explained by changes in personnel policy such as increased use of monitoring and screening of workers. Essay II examines the background to gender differences in work absence. Women are found, as in many earlier studies, to have higher absence levels than men. Our analysis, using finite mixture models, reveals that there are a group of women, comprised of about 41% of the women in our sample, that have a high average demand of absence. Among men, the high demand group is smaller consisting of about 36% of the male sample. The absence behavior differs as much between groups within gender as it does between men and women. The access to panel data covering the period 1971-1991 enables an analysis of the increased gender gap over time. Our analysis shows that the increased gender gap can be attributed to changes in behavior rather than in observable characteristics. Essay III analyzes the difference in work absence between natives and immigrants. Immigrants are found to have higher absence than natives when measured as the number of absent days. For the number of absence spells, the pattern for immigrants and natives is about the same. The analysis, using panel data and count data models, show that natives and immigrants have different characteristics concerning family situation, work conditions and health. We also find that natives and immigrants respond differently to these characteristics. We find, for example, that the absence of natives and immigrants are differently related to both economic incentives and work environment. Finally, our analysis shows that differences in work conditions and work environment only can explain a minor part of the ethnic differences in absence during the 1980’s.
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