| 1. |
- Jävervall, Sebastian, 1990-
(author)
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Corruption, Distortions and Development
- 2021
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Essay I: Does increased government transparency make bureaucracies more meritocratic? I study the impact of politician disclosure requirements on the assignment of bureaucrats to public posts. I collect detailed information on bureaucrats' qualifications and construct a novel measure of bureaucratic mismatch—an index measuring the extent to which a bureaucrat is under- or overqualified to perform a specific task. Using the staggered implementation of Indian state elections for identification, I find that information disclosure is associated with a mismatch reduction of 2.5% of a standard deviation. This effect is substantially larger (15–45% of a standard deviation) in posts that are more important for policy implementation and tasks that bureaucrats perceive to be more prestigious. In addition, I find that information disclosure increases returns to bureaucrat skill. Bureaucrats with greater skill are more likely to reach prestigious positions in more transparent states. Taken together, the results show that government transparency promotes meritocracy within public organizations.Essay II (with Roza Khoban): Political distortions are prevalent in many developing countries and can imply substantial productivity losses. Theory is ambiguous as to whether greater openness to trade amplifies or reduces the effects of such distortions. This paper shows that trade liberalization in India decreased the value of firms' political connections, suggesting a reduction in political distortions. First, using variation in firm connections stemming from political turnover, we identify that political connections increase firm performance by 10–20%. Second, we evaluate how the value of political connections changed after India's externally imposed tariff reductions, using a triple-difference and difference-in-discontinuities design. We find that political connections became substantially less valuable when tariffs on input goods were reduced. Our findings imply that access to international markets reduces firms' dependence on political connections to source input goods, thus reducing the distortionary effect of such connections. Our results suggest a new margin for gains from trade in the presence of political distortions through a direct effect of trade liberalization on the prevalence of such distortions.Essay III: Social unrest is a pervasive problem in the developing world. Yet, the causes of social unrest are not fully understood. This paper studies the impact of electing dominant party representatives on social unrest in South Africa. Since the end of apartheid, the African National Congress (ANC) party has held a hegemonic position in South African politics. At the same time, the party has been criticized for poor implementation of basic service delivery and accused of corruption and government malpractice. Combining geo-referenced data on riots and protests with a regression discontinuity design, I find that the prevalence of violent social unrest is substantially lower in ANC-controlled areas. The findings provide a nuanced perspective on the political determinants of social unrest in a dominant party setting.
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| 2. |
- Klarin, Jonas
(author)
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Empirical Essays in Public and Political Economics
- 2020
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Essay I: This paper proposes a novel approach to the issue of size, cost-efficiency and economies of scale by focusing on the break-up of municipalities. Municipal break-ups are an understudied phenomenon that nevertheless has been recurrent not only in parts of eastern Europe, but also in Spain and Sweden. Analyzing seven voluntary break-ups of Swedish municipalities, we estimate the effects of municipal splits on municipal total costs as well as administrative costs. To predict what would have happened had the splits not taken place, we apply the matrix completion method with nuclear norm minimization. Our results do not support the standard view, i.e. that smaller municipalities imply higher per capita costs. Instead, we find that costs increase in some municipalities, are unaffected in others and decrease elsewhere. The findings point to the complex nature of territorial reforms, the difficulty in drawing general conclusions of such, and hence, the perils of expecting them to have uniform outcomes.
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| 3. |
- Lundqvist, Heléne, 1982-
(author)
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Empirical Essays in Political and Public Economics
- 2011
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This thesis consists of four self-contained essays. Essay 1: Despite the key role played by political payoffs in theory, very little is known empirically about the types of payoffs that motivate politicians. The purpose of this paper is to bring light onto this. I estimate causal effects of being elected in a local election on monetary returns. The claim for causality, I argue, can be made thanks to a research design where the income of some candidate who just barely won a seat is compared to that of some other candidate who was close to winning a seat for the same party, but ultimately did not. This research design is made possible thanks to a comprehensive, detailed data set covering all Swedish politicians who have run for office in the period 1991—2006. I establish that monetary returns are absent both in the short and long run. In stead, politicians seem to be motivated by non-monetary payoffs that can be realized with a successful political career. Essay 2 (with Matz Dahlberg and Karin Edmark): In recent decades, the immigration of workers and refugees toEurope has increased substantially, and the composition of the population in many countries has consequently become much more heterogeneous in terms of ethnic background. If people exhibit in-group bias in the sense of being more altruistic to one's own kind, such increased heterogeneity will lead to reduced support for redistribution among natives. This paper exploits a nationwide program placing refugees in municipalities throughoutSweden during the period 1985—94 to isolate exogenous variation in immigrant shares. We match data on refugee placement to panel survey data on inhabitants of the receiving municipalities to estimate the causal effects of increased immigrant shares on preferences for redistribution. The results show that a larger immigrant population leads to less support for redistribution in the form of preferred social benefit levels. This reduction in support is especially pronounced for respondents with high income and wealth. We also establish that OLS estimators that do not properly deal with endogeneity problems – as in earlier studies – are likely to yield positively biased (i.e., less negative) effects of ethnic heterogeneity on preferences for redistribution. Essay 3: While the literature on how intergovernmental grants affect the budget of receiving jurisdictions is numerous, the very few studies that explicitly deal with likely endogeneity problems focus on grants targeted towards specific sectors or specific type of recipients. The results from these studies are mixed and make it clear that the knowledge about grants effects is to this date still insufficient. This paper contributes to this literature by estimating causal effects on local expenditures and income tax rates of general, non-targeted grants. This is done in a difference-in-difference model utilizing policy-induced increases in grants to a group of remotely populated municipalities inFinland. The robust finding is that increased grants have a negligible effect on local income tax rates, but that there is a substantial positive immediate response in local expenditures. Furthermore, there is no evidence of dynamic crowding-out – i.e., that the immediate response in expenditures is reversed in later years. The flypaper behavior displayed by the treatment group can potentially be explained by “separate mental accounting” – i.e., voters treating the government budget constraint separately from their own. Essay 4 (with Matz Dahlberg and Eva Mörk): Public employment plays an important role in most countries, as it is closely linked to both the quality of publicly provided welfare services and total employment. Large parts of those employed by the public sector are typically employed by lower-level governments, and one potential instrument with which central decision-makers can affect public employment is thus grants to lower-level governments. This paper investigates the effects of general grants on local public employment. Applying the regression kink design to the Swedish grant system, we are able to estimate causal effects of intergovernmental grants on personnel in different local government sectors. Our robust conclusion is that there was a substantial increase in personnel in the central administration after a marginal increase in grants, but that such an effect was lacking both for total personnel and personnel in child care, schools, elderly care, social welfare and technical services. We suggest several potential reasons for these results, such as heterogeneous treatment effects and bureaucratic influence in the local decision-making process.
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| 4. |
- Moberg, Ylva, 1984-
(author)
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Gender, Incentives, and the Division of Labor
- 2017
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This thesis consists of four self-contained essays. Essay 1: The length of parental leave entitlements is known to affect take-up rates, division of parental leave between parents, and the mother's decision to return to work. So far, however, the importance of the level of benefit has received little attention in the literature. Using population wide register data, I exploit the ``speed premium” rule in the Swedish parental leave system as a source of random variation in the benefit level. A fuzzy RD strategy is used to estimate the causal effect of a change in the level of benefits per day on the utilization of parental leave among Swedish parents. The results suggest that parents’ take-up of benefits is highly sensitive to the benefit level. A 1% (5 SEK ≈ 0.54 $) increase in the mother's benefits per day is found to increase her length of leave by about 1 % (2.6 days). This translates into an elasticity of take-up duration (length of spell) with respect to the benefit level of 1, a parameter that has not been estimated before. Fathers respond to the increase in mothers’ take-up by reducing their time on leave by an almost equivalent number of days (1.9 days). In other words, the change in benefit level affects not only the individual’s take-up, but the division of parental leave between parents.Essay II: In this paper, I compare the effect of entering parenthood in lesbian and heterosexual couples using Swedish population-wide register data. Comparing couples with similar pre-childbirth income gaps, a difference-in-differences strategy is used to estimate the impact of the gender composition of the couple on the spousal income gap after childbirth. The results indicate that the gender of the parents' does matter for their division of labor as, five years after childbirth, the income gap is significantly smaller in lesbian than in heterosexual couples, also when comparing couples with the same pre-parenthood income gap. Part of the explanation is a difference in biological restrictions: lesbian partners often give birth to one child each and spend more time at home with the child they carried. Other explanations are the influence of gender norms and differences in preferences between lesbian and heterosexual couples.Essay III: The skewed division of parental responsibilities during a child's infancy is often assumed to be a natural consequence of the mother being pregnant and wanting to breastfeed. In this paper, I investigate to what extent the tendency to let the mother be the main caregiver of an infant can be explained by the fact that she is the one to be pregnant, not the father. Using the division of parental leave during the child’s first two years with the parents as a proxy for the division of parental responsibilities, I compare the behavior of biological parents (where the mother gave birth) to adoptive parents (where she did not) in Swedish population-wide register data. My results show that adoptive parents, both mothers and fathers, spend less time on parental leave than biological parents, but that the mother's share of leave is about the same as among biological parents. There is thus some support for the hypothesis that a biological tie increases parents’ initial investment in children, but not that this relationship is stronger for women. Hence, there is no evidence that the mother’s birth giving status can explain her share of parental responsibilities. Due to methodological challenges, it is difficult to disentangle the different mechanisms that could explain the results.Essay IV (with Spencer Bastani and Håkan Selin): No previous quasi-experimental paper has systematically examined the relationship between the extensive margin labor supply response to taxation and the employment level. We model the labor force participation margin and estimate participation responses for married women in Sweden using population-wide administrative data and a solid identification strategy. The participation elasticity is more than twice as large in the lowest-skill sample (with relatively low employment) as compared with the highest-skill sample (with high employment). Our analysis suggests that cross- and within country comparisons of participation elasticities always should be made with reference to the relevant employment level.
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| 5. |
- Odendahl, Christian, 1980-
(author)
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Parties, Majorities, Incumbencies : Four essays in political economics
- 2013
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This thesis consists of four self-contained essays on political economics. The first paper studies the impact of having one party in government versus a coalition of parties, where the exogenous variation in the type of government stems from close election outcomes. It uses a new algorithm to detect these close elections in multi-party systems to answer this question. Based on data from more than 2,000 municipalities in the German state of Bavaria, it finds that single-party governments spend more, not less as is often concluded in the theoretical and empirical literature. The second paper uses the same method of detecting close elections to extract exogenous variation, but looks at the political power of parties and its effect on tax policies. It finds significant effects of party power that are mostly in line with expectations. The third paper looks at the transition of voters between parties in three consecutive elections for the state parliament in Bavaria, and infers parties’ ideological positions from these transition flows. After estimating the transition matrices with a method based on maximum entropy, it uses these matrices to compute a distance matrix and uses multi-dimensional scaling to place parties in a policy space. The resulting positions of parties are plausible, consistent across both transition periods, and comparable to those estimated with other methods. The final paper studies the heterogeneity in the advantage of incumbent district candidates in German federal and state parliament elections. In particular, it looks at the party in government, and how that affects the incumbency advantage of district candidates. It finds that an incumbency effect only exists (for both major parties) if the center-left SPD is in government, a heterogeneity that is robust across different specifications and jurisdictions.
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| 6. |
- Persson, Anna
(author)
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Activation Programs, Benefit Take-Up, and Labor Market Attachment
- 2013
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Essay 1 (with Ulrika Vikman): Previous literature shows that activation requirements for welfare participants reduce welfare participation, but the dynamics behind these results have not been fully examined. In this paper we use a rich set of register data covering the entire working age population in a Swedish municipality to study how the introduction of mandatory activation programs aimed at unemployed welfare participants affect the probability of entering and exiting welfare. Our results indicate that the reduction in the number of welfare participants is mainly due to an increase in welfare exits. The effect is larger for unmarried individuals without children and for young individuals. Among the young we also find a reduction in welfare entries. It thus seems that individuals with fewer family responsibilities are more responsive to the reform.Essay 2: We study the impact of a set of labour market programs directed to unemployed welfare participants on criminal behaviour. To isolate the causal effect we exploit the sequential implementation of activation programs in municipalities and districts in Stockholm county. We find that criminal activity increased as a result of the programs. The size and significance levels of the estimates should be interpreted with caution, but we can conclude that the reform did at least not have a mitigating effect on crime. We find no evidence that the effect is larger for financially motivated crime.Essay 3: Given the trend towards more active policies on reducing the take-up of welfare benefits, the consequences of leaving welfare constitutes an important issue. This paper studies disposable income and poverty among welfare leavers in Sweden during 19 years (1990-2008). Using a rich set of register data we can accurately measure disposable income and labor market outcomes. We find that there are large significant differences in post welfare financial situation among those working full time and those who work only a little or not at all. Leavers neither working nor receiving benefits from social insurance are likely to be financially dependent on family members, and are more likely than others to be in poverty. We conclude that leaving welfare is not always associated with becoming financially better off, post welfare well being depend heavily on labor market outcomes.Essay 4 (with Matz Dahlberg and Linna Martén): In 1999, the Swedish government announced one of the largest reforms of the national defense in modern times, which led to closures and significant downsizing of several military bases, as well as large reductions of the workforce. Previous studies have found that workers that have been displaced from their previous employers experience significant earnings declines, even in the long run. In this paper we study the labor market effects of the involuntary job losses following the drastic changes of the Swedish security policy. Using population wide register data we estimate how labor income and unemployment benefit take-up changed among those employed at the affected military bases, relative to workers at unaffected military units. We find a decrease in labor earnings, primarily among civil servants. We find no effect on neither unemployment nor employment, indicating that the drop in earnings is likely to be driven by lower re-employment wages.
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| 7. |
- Sosa Andrés, Maximiliano
(author)
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A Risky and Polarized World : Essays on Uncertainty, Ideology and Foreign Policy
- 2023
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Essay 1 - We examine whether risk aversion as well as higher order risk attitudes (HORAs) (prudence and temperance) have changed during COVID-19. We include prudence and temperance as higher order measures, as these two have been largely understudied under extreme events but are determinants of decisions related to the health and financial domains. Once we account for socio-demographic characteristics, we find an overall increase in risk aversion during COVID-19. We do not find changes in prudence and temperance using the risk apportionment methodology.Essay 2 –I develop a new index of legal uncertainty, by extracting the topics in all laws approved in a country and year to calculate the unforecastable component in legal content, for a panel of 42 countries. I present how the index is constructed, test its robustness and compare it with available measures of institutional quality. I then apply the index to provide evidence on the consequences of legal uncertainty for investment and employment. Results show that, in the event of an increase in legal uncertainty, firms react by slowing down investments and laying off workers.Essay 3 - We implement a regression-discontinuity design on US data to study how divided government affects the polarization of the legislature, inter-branch conflict, and policy implementation. We document that Republican legislators serving under a divided government have more conservative ideologies than those serving under a fully unified government. We find an opposite effect for Democrats. In terms of policy implementation, we find evidence of moderation: compared to unified Republican governments, divided ones with a democratic chamber implement more liberal policies. Correspondingly, when Democrats lose unified control, policies become more conservative.Essay 4 - We analyze the impact of ideological alignment in the left-right spectrum between countries on the human rights recommendations sent within the Universal Periodic Review (UPR). By combining UPR records with data on political institutions, we determine if shared ideology between two country governments affects human rights policy. By using text-mining techniques, we analyze the sentiment of messages, and provide robust evidence that ideologically aligned governments send more positive and praising messages compared to non-aligned ones.
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| 8. |
- Sävje, Fredrik, 1986-
(author)
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What would have happened? : Four essays investigating causality
- 2015
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This dissertation consists of four self-contained essays.Essay 1. A common method to reduce the uncertainty of causal inferences from experiments is to assign treatments in fixed proportions within groups of similar units: blocking. Previous results indicate that one can expect substantial reductions in variance if these groups are formed so to contain exactly as many units as treatment conditions. This approach can be contrasted to threshold blocking which, instead of specifying a fixed size, requires that the groups contain a minimum number of units. In this essay, I investigate the advantages of respective method. In particular, I show that threshold blocking is superior to fixed-sized blocking in the sense that it always finds a weakly better grouping for any objective and sample. However, this does not necessarily hold when the objective function of the blocking problem is unknown, and a fixed-sized design can perform better in that case. I specifically examine the factors that govern how the methods perform in the common situation where the objective is to reduce the estimator's variance, but where groups are constructed based on covariates. This reveals that the relative performance of threshold blocking improves when the covariates become more predictive of the outcome.Essay 2. Inferences from randomized experiments can be improved by blocking: assigning treatment in fixed proportions within groups of similar units. The use of the method, however, is limited by the difficulty in deriving these groups. Current blocking methods are restricted to special cases or run in exponential time; are not sensitive to clustering of data points; and are often heuristic, providing an unsatisfactory solution in many common instances. This essay introduces an algorithm that implements a new, widely applicable class of blocking—threshold blocking—that solves these problems. Given a minimum required group size and a distance metric, we study the blocking problem of minimizing the maximum distance between any two units within the same group. We prove this is a NP-hard problem and derive an approximation algorithm that yields a blocking where the maximum distance is guaranteed to be at most four times the optimal value. This algorithm runs in O(n log n) time with O(n) space complexity. This makes it the first blocking method with an ensured level of performance that works in massive experiments. While many commonly used algorithms form pairs of units, our algorithm constructs the groups flexibly for any chosen minimum size. This facilitates complex experiments with several treatment arms and clustered data. A simulation study demonstrates the efficiency and efficacy of our blocking algorithm; tens of millions of units can be blocked using a desktop computer in a few minutes.Essay 3. Scholars study political incumbency effects to disentangle how office holding affects subsequent election results. Several types of effects have been discussed and investigated in this time-honored literature, but few have been formally defined. The recent popularity of the regression discontinuity design to investigate the topic has, however, converged the focus to one particular effect: the party incumbency effect. That is, the effect on parties from being an incumbent party. In this essay, I introduce a causal model with which most of the previously discussed effect can be defined. In particular, I can give formal definitions of the incumbent legislator effect—the effect on parties of having an incumbent office holder as candidate—and the personal incumbency effect—the effect on candidates of being the incumbent office holder. Using the model, I decompose the party incumbency effect into these newly defined effects, thereby providing a link between the different effects. The model also allows me to revisit previous estimator and derive which effect they estimate. This investigation reveals that the legislator effect has been in focus in much of the past literature. Motivated by the lack of identification strategies for the personal effect, I introduce several strategies which, under suitable assumptions, can identify the effect. Last, to illustrate these strategies, I investigate the personal incumbency effect in recent Brazilian mayoral elections.Essay 4. Recent research has reported positive effects on schooling, particularly for girls, due to in utero protection from iodine deficiency resulting from iodized oil capsule distribution in Tanzania. These results suggest that similar health interventions might have contributed to the reduction of the educational gender gap and, more generally, unveiled a mechanism through which the natural health environment affects social and economic development. In this essay, we revisit the Tanzanian experience by investigating how these effects differ over time and across surveys; across different treatment specifications; and across additional educational outcome measures. Contrary to previous studies, we find that the estimated effects tend to be small and not robust across specifications or samples. Using all available data and a medically motivated iodine depletion function, we find no evidence of a positive long-run effect of iodine deficiency protection on educational attainment.
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| 9. |
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| 10. |
- Aggeborn, Linuz, 1986-
(author)
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Essays on Politics and Health Economics
- 2016
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Essay I (with Mattias Öhman): Fluoridation of the drinking water is a public policy whose aim is to improve dental health. Although the evidence is clear that fluoride is good for dental health, concerns have been raised regarding potential negative effects on cognitive development. We study the effects of fluoride exposure through the drinking water in early life on cognitive and non-cognitive ability, education and labor market outcomes in a large-scale setting. We use a rich Swedish register dataset for the cohorts born 1985-1992, together with drinking water fluoride data. To estimate the effect we exploit intra-municipality variation of fluoride, stemming from an exogenous variation in the bedrock. First, we investigate and confirm the long-established positive relationship between fluoride and dental health. Second, we find precisely estimated zero effects on cognitive ability, non-cognitive ability and education. We do not find any evidence that fluoride levels below 1.5 mg/l have negative effects. Third, we find evidence that fluoride improves labor market outcome later in life, which indicates that good dental health is a positive factor on the labor market.
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