| 1. |
- Ahlerup, Pelle, 1977, et al.
(författare)
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Do the land-poor gain from agricultural investments? Empirical evidence from Zambia using panel data
- 2015
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Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In the context of the global land rush, some portray large-scale land acquisitions as a potent threat to the livelihoods of already marginalized rural farming households in Africa. In order to avoid the potential pitfall of studying a particular project that may well have atypical effects, this paper systematically investigates the impact on commercial farm wage incomes for rural smallholder households of all pledged investments in the agricultural sector in Zambia between 1994 and 2007. The results suggest that agricultural investments are associated with a robust moderate positive effect, but only for households with a relative shortage of land.
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| 2. |
- Bigsten, Arne, 1947, et al.
(författare)
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The Changing Structure of Swedish Foreign Aid
- 2016
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Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The study investigates how the composition and character of aid of Swedish aid has changed over time, and what effects these changes have had for the potential to realize key aspects of the Paris agenda such as ownership, alignment, harmonisation, and accountability and the ability to deliver aid efficiently. We analyse the changes in Swedish aid flows since 1990 and compare with changes in the global pattern in terms of purpose, country allocation, channels, and modalities. We discuss how these changes are likely to have affected the efficiency of Sweden as a donor. We conclude with a discussion about the future direction of Swedish aid.
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| 3. |
- Adermon, Adrian, et al.
(författare)
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Intergenerational wealth mobility and the role of inheritance: Evidence from multiple generations
- 2016
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Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This study estimates intergenerational correlations in mid-life wealth across three generations, and a young fourth generation, and examines how much of the parent-child association that can be explained by inheritances. Using a Swedish data set we find parent-child rank correlations of 0.3–0.4 and grandparents-grandchild rank correlations of 0.1–0.2. Conditional on parents’ wealth, grandparents’ wealth is weakly positively associated with grandchild’s wealth and the parent-child correlation is basically unchanged if we control for grandparents’ wealth. Bequests and gifts strikingly account for at least 50 per cent of the parent-child wealth correlation while earnings and education are only able to explain 25 per cent.
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| 4. |
- Ahlerup, Pelle, 1977
(författare)
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Foreign aid and structural transformation: Micro-level evidence from Uganda
- 2019
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Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- History tells us that sustained economic growth, necessary to alleviate poverty in sub-Saharan Africa, requires growth in the fundamentals, such as infrastructure and human capital, but also structural transformation, i.e., a reallocation of labor from low-productivity to high-productivity sectors. I study whether foreign aid is a factor that helps or hinders structural transformation. I use a dataset on aid projects with precise coordinates from all major donors and match it to panel data with extensive information on labor market activities for a large representative sample of individuals in Uganda. I find consistent evidence that foreign aid reverses the process of structural transformation. More specifically, the local short-term effect of foreign aid is that people in areas with ongoing aid projects work more in agriculture and less in non-agricultural sectors. There are no significant effects on wages or household expenditures for people in the agricultural sector, but the effects on people in non-agricultural sectors are negative.
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| 5. |
- Ahlerup, Pelle, 1977, et al.
(författare)
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Gold mining and education: a long-run resource curse in Africa?
- 2016
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Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- We provide micro-level evidence on an important channel through which mineral resources may adversely affect development in the long-run: lower educational attainment. Combining Afrobarometer survey data with geocoded data on the discovery and shutdown dates of of gold mines, we show that respondents who had a gold mine within their district when they were in adolescence have significantly lower educational attainment. These results are robust to the omission of individual countries, different definitions of adulthood, the use of alternative data from the Development and Health Surveys (DHS), and buffer-based approaches to define neighborhood. Regarding mechanisms, we conclude that the educational costs of mines are likely due to households making myopic educational decisions when employment in gold mining is an alternative. We explore and rule out competing mechanism such as endogenous migration, a lower provision of public goods by the government, and a higher propensity for violent conflicts in gold mining districts.
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| 6. |
- Akay, Alpaslan, 1975, et al.
(författare)
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Back To Bentham: Should We? Large‐Scale Comparison of Decision versus Experienced Utility for Income‐Leisure Preferences
- 2015
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Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Subjective well‐being (SWB) is increasingly used as a way to measure individual well‐being. Interpreted as "experienced utility", it has been compared to "decision utility" using specific experiments (Kahneman et al., 1997) or stated preferences (Benjamin et al. 2012). We suggest here an original large‐scale comparison between ordinal preferences elicited from SWB data and those inferred from actual choices (revealed preferences). Precisely, we focus on income‐leisure preferences, closely associated to redistributive policies. We compare indifference curves consistent with income‐leisure subjective satisfaction with those derived from actual labor supply choices, on the same panel of British households. Results show striking similarities between these measures on average, reflecting that overall, people’s decision are not inconsistent with SWB maximization. Yet, the shape of individual preferences differ across approaches when looking at specific subpopulations. We investigate these differences and test for potential explanatory channels, particularly the roles of constraints and of individual "errors" related to aspirations, expectations or focusing illusion. We draw implications of our results for welfare analysis and policy evaluation.
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| 7. |
- Akay, Alpaslan, 1975, et al.
(författare)
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Everybody’s a Victim? Global Terror, Well-Being and Political Attitudes
- 2018
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Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Terror has become a global issue. Terror acts perpetuated by religious, nationalist or political groups around the globe can propagate distress rapidly through different channels and possibly change political attitudes. This paper suggests the first evaluation of the impact of global terror on human welfare. We combine panel datasets for Australia, Germany, Russia, Switzerland, the UK and the US. Individual well-being information for 750,000 individual x year observations, recorded on precise dates, is matched with daily information on the 70,000 terror events that took place worldwide during 1994-2013. High-frequency data and quasi-random terror shocks of varying intensity provide the conditions for robust inference, while external validity is guaranteed by the use of large representative samples. We find a significantly negative effect of global terror on well-being, with a money-metric cost of around 6% - 17% of national income. Among diffusion channels, stock markets and economic anticipations play a minimal role, while traditional media filter the most salient events. The effect is greatly modulated by the physical, genetic or cultural proximity to the terror regions/victims. For a subset of countries, we also show that global terror has significantly increased the intention to vote for conservative parties. Heterogeneity analyses point to the mediating effect of risk perception: individuals who exhibit stronger emotional responses to terror impossibly more exposed to potential threats - are also more likely to experience a conservative shift.
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| 8. |
- Akay, Alpaslan, 1975
(författare)
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Personality and Positionality
- 2019
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Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This paper employs survey experiments to examine the relationship between personality characteristics and positional concerns across a wide range of “goods,” e.g., income and market value of a car, and “bads,” e.g., infant mortality and poverty rates. Personality characteristics are measured using the five-factor model (Big-5), the locus of control, and the reciprocity. We demonstrate that there are significant relationships between personality types and positional concerns, which differ both by the type of personality and by the nature of a good. The results are highly consistent with the predictions presented in the field of personality psychology. That is, while agreeableness is negatively associated, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and external locus of control are positively associated with positional concerns for most goods. Importantly, there is also a substantial heterogeneity in the mean degree of positional concerns across the low and high values of most personality characteristics and goods.
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| 9. |
- Akay, Alpaslan, 1975, et al.
(författare)
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Remittances and Relative Concerns in Rural China
- 2015
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Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The paper investigates the impact of remittances on the relative concerns of households in rural China. Using the Rural to Urban Migration in China (RUMiC) dataset we estimate a series of well-being functions to simultaneously explore the relative concerns with respect to income and remittances. Our results show that although rural households experience substantial utility loss due to income comparisons, they gain utility by comparing their remittances with those received by their reference group. In other words, we find evidence of a “status-effect” with respect to income and of a “signal-effect” with respect to remittances. The magnitudes of these two opposite effects are very similar, implying that the utility reduction due to relative income is compensated by the utility gain due to relative remittances. This finding is robust to various specifications, controlling for the endogeneity of remittances and selective migration, as well as a measure of current migrants’ net remittances calculated using counterfactual income and expenditures.
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| 10. |
- Akay, Alpaslan, 1975, et al.
(författare)
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Standing in Others' Shoes: Empathy and Positional Behavior
- 2019
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Ingår i: Frontiers in Psychology. - Gothenburg : Frontiers Media SA. - 1664-1078. ; 10
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Studies show that people are concerned with other people's consumption position in a varying degree with respect to the type of goods consumed and individual characteristics. Using both survey experiments and a large survey of subjective well-being (SWB) dataset, this paper aims to investigate the association between the degree of empathic capacity and positional concerns for consumption items involving pleasure and pain. The paper exploits both empathy quotient (EQ) and interpersonal reactivity index (IRI) measures of empathic capacity, i.e., dispositional empathy, which are sufficient measures capturing affective and cognitive aspects of empathy. Positional concerns are identified directly using a series of stated choice experiments and indirectly using the SWB approach. The main result of the paper is that positional concerns vary substantially with the levels of empathic capacity. Both EQ and IRI are found to be positively associated with positional concerns for "goods" (e.g., after-tax income, market value of a luxury car), reflecting a degree of self-regarded feelings and behavior to reduce personal distress, and negatively associated with positional concerns for "bads" (e.g., working hours and poverty rates), reflecting a degree of other-regarding feelings and behavior. The results are robust with respect to various checks including statistical specifications, reference groups, and omitted variables (e.g., prosocial behavior and competitivity) that could bias the results.
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