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- Sjöberg, Eric, 1984-
(författare)
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Essays on Environmental Regulation, Management and Conflict
- 2013
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis consists of three different papers summarized as follows. In The political economy of environmental regulation, I study how enforcement of national environmental legislation differ across municipalities in Sweden depending on the local political situation. While the legislation is national, enforcement is decentralized. I find that municipalities where the Green Party joins the ruling political coalition issue more environmental fines than other municipalities. In pricing on the fish market I use Swedish data to study how size affects the price per kilo of fish for several species. In traditional fishery biomass models, fish stocks are treated as homogenous. New theoretical heterogeneous fishery models, where size is allowed to differ in a fish stock, have important implications for regulation, for example that it is optimal to regulate on numbers of fish instead of weight. However, prices in these models are assumed to be constant. My estimates can be used to shed some light on how prices change when the size composition of the catch changes. In my third and final chapter, Settlement under the threat of conflict - The cost of asymmetric information, I present a theoretical model where two players can divide a good peacefully or engage in a contest in order to obtain the entire good. I assume that one player's valuation of the good is private information and show how this affects the expected cost of the contest and thus the probability of peaceful settlement.
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| 2. |
- 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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| 3. |
- 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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| 4. |
- Olme, Elisabet, 1986-
(författare)
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Essays on Educational Choices and Integration
- 2019
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Are Parents Uninformed? The Impact of School Performance Information on School Choices and School Assignments. We study the impact of providing information about schools' performances on households' choice of school. A randomly selected subset of households with children about to start middle school in a Swedish municipality were provided with information about the schools’ performances on standardized tests. We find that this information made them more likely to apply to the top-performing schools, compared to households in the control group. The effect is driven by native children and children to high-skilled parents. Next, we simulate how this would affect the allocation of students to schools, under the assumption that all households would have access to this information. As expected, enrollment in top-performing schools increase, but the effect is muted by the schools' capacity constraints. Again, native and high-skilled drive the effect, by shifting their applications from mid- to top-performing schools. This leads to reduced school segregation by foreign background as children with a foreign background are overrepresented at the top-performing schools to begin with. Furthermore, school segregation by parental education increases slightly as children with highly educated parents congregate at the top-performing schools.
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| 5. |
- Thornquist, Tamara, 1988-
(författare)
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Essays in economics : The impact of changes on the labor market induced by structural change, the adoption of a new computer-based technology and economic slowdowns on family formation, family fertility outcomes and new careers
- 2020
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Childlessness, Number of Children and The Labor Market at the Time of a New Technology, the US 1980-2018The adoption of a new computer-based technology in the US in the late 1970s resulted in broad changes on the labor market that can be described by two major phenomena - job polarization and a shift in the relative returns to skill. A well established theoretical and empirical literature shows that commuting zones with a historically greater specialization in routine task intensive occupations adopted the new computer-based technology faster and subsequently saw greater changes on the local labor markets. In this paper, I build on the previous literature and analyze the relationship between the historical specialization of commuting zones in routine task intensive occupations and the change in family fertility outcomes in the US 1980-2018. The prediction is that commuting zones with a greater initial routine task specialization adopted the new technology faster and thereafter saw greater changes on the local labor markets, which further led to greater changes in the fertility outcomes. The estimation results suggest that among women in the age group 20-39 of any educational level, the shares of women with at least one child and at least two children decreased by more in commuting zones with a historically greater routine task employment. The result is driven by college educated women.Marital economic homogamy and earnings polarization, the US 1970-2018In this paper I analyze what impact the polarization of earnings had on a rise in the economic resemblance between marriage partners aged 27-36 in the US 1970-2018. An earnings polarization means that the relative earnings gap at the upper end of the earnings distribution has been widening, while the relative earnings gap at the lower end of the earnings distribution has been narrowing in the US since the 1950s-1960s. I employ a structural change driven explanation of labor market polarization and the instrumental variable technique to identify the causal effect of interest. The estimation results show that the marital economic resemblance increases on the widening relative earnings gap at the upper/lower part of the earnings distribution and decreases on the narrowing relative earnings gap at the upper/lower part of the earnings distribution. Keeping all else equal, the polarization of earnings would account for 19 to 25 percent of the rise in the coefficient of marital sorting in the US between 1970 and 2018.New Careers, Labor Market Turmoil and Gender: Evidence from Russia 2000-2016 In this paper I study what was the effect of entering the labor market under adverse economic conditions on the career development of college educated men and women in Russia 2000-2016. The instrumental variable technique is used to identify the causal effect of interest. I find a negative immediate effect of graduating in a bad economy on the log hourly wage among all college graduates and among college graduate men. Although the negative effect gradually dissipates as the economy picks up, it remains present years after graduation. When it comes to college women, no immediate effect of graduating in a bad economy on the hourly wage is identified. The negative effect on the hourly wage among women first pops up three to five years after graduation. College men and women who graduated in a bad economy do, on average, have lower quality jobs which might explain negatively affected hourly wages.
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