| 1. |
- Nilsson, Anna, 1977-
(author)
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Indirect effects of unemployment and low earnings : Crime and children's school performance
- 2005
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This thesis consists of three self-contained essays that consider indirect effects of unemployment and low earnings on crime and children’s school performance. The first essay, Crime, unemployment and labor market programs in turbulent times (joint with Jonas Agell), investigates the effect of unemployment and participation in labor market programs, in general and among youth, on Swedish crime rates using a new panel data set for Swedish municipalities for the period 1996-2000. The exceptional variation in Swedish unemployment in the 1990s provides a remarkable (quasi-) experiment. Between 1996 and 2000 the overall unemployment rate (including those enrolled in labor market programs) decreased from 11.9 to 6.8 percent, and for those most likely to commit crimes, people under the age of 25, unemployment decreased from 21.2 to 8.7 percent. But the decrease in unemployment was far from uniform across the country, and our identification strategy is to use the exceptional variation in the improvement in labor market conditions across municipalities to isolate the relationship between unemployment and crime. We also consider whether placement in labor market programs reduce crime. Such an effect could arise for many reasons. Program participation may imply: (i) that there is less time for other activities, including crime; (ii) social interactions that prevent the participant from adopting the wrong kind of social norms; (iii) a greater ability to earn legal income in the labor market. Unlike most previous studies we identify a statistically and economically significant effect of general unemployment on the incidence of burglary, auto-theft and drug possession. Contrary to much popular wisdom, however, we could not establish a clear association between youth unemployment and the incidence of youthful crimes and there is no evidence that labor market programs – general ones and those targeted to the young – help to reduce crime.The second essay, Earnings and crime: The case of Sweden, analyzes whether low earnings has an effect on Swedish crime rates, considering the overall crime rate and specific property crime categories, using a panel of county-level data for the period 1975–2000. Various measures of the income distribution are considered, based on annual labor earnings as well as annual disposable income. The results indicate that the effect of low earnings on crime in Sweden is at best weak. We estimate a significant effect of low earnings on the number of auto thefts, but the effect is small. Low earnings seem to have no effect on the overall crime rate, the number of burglaries or the robbery rate. The results give, however, further support for an unambiguous link between unemployment and the overall crime rate as well as specific property crime categories. These findings are in contrast with results from, for example, the United States where wages are found to have a stronger impact on crime than unemployment. The differing results could, at least partly, be explained by the fact that during the period investigated, Swedish unemployment has been of a more permanent nature than U.S. unemployment, and that transitory earnings fluctuations appear to dominate the Swedish earnings distribution for young men, a part of the population committing a disproportionate share of many crimes.Finally, the third essay, Parental unemployment and children’s school performance, considers another possible indirect effect of unemployment, namely the school performance of the children of the unemployed. I use Swedish data on individual GPA from the completion of primary school at age 16 and final grades from upper secondary school for a majority of all children completing primary school in 1990 directly moving on to three years of upper secondary school, which they complete in 1993. The empirical method builds on the idea that primary school GPA can be used to control for family and individual heterogeneity. The huge variation in Swedish unemployment during the beginning of the 1990s, which can be traced to macroeconomic events, provides an ideal setting for testing the hypothesis that parental unemployment affects children’s school performance. The main results can be summarized as follows. If a mother is subjected to an unemployment spell during the period when one of her children attends upper secondary school, the school performance of the child marginally improves. This implies that, for women, the positive effect of having extra time on your hands exceeds the negative effects of the disadvantages caused by unemployment. This positive effect of having an unemployed mother seems to increase with the length of the unemployment spell. On the opposite, having a short-term unemployed father has a negative effect on a child’s school performance while the effect is insignificant for long-term paternal unemployment. The fact that a long-term unemployment spell of the father has a less clear effect could be interpreted as the shock of unemployment wearing out. One explanation for the differing results across genders could be that women in general cope better with being unemployed and hence are able to use their new extra time doing something productive, such as spending quality time with their children.
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| 2. |
- Wilkens, Carl, 1968-
(author)
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Auri sacra fames : Interest Rates -- Prediction, Jumps and the Market Price of Risk
- 2005
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This thesis consists of three essays investigating different aspects of interest rates."Prediction of Future Risk-Neutral Short-Term Interest Rate Densities: Can the Black, Derman and Toy Model Assist?" (Co-authored with David Vestin.) This essay evaluates two different approaches to inferring expectations of future interest rates from asset prices. One is based on bond data and builds on the Black, Derman and Toy model, the other is based on option prices. We compare the outcome with a specified assumed benchmark data generating process. The main conclusion is that the option based model works well, whereas the bond based model has difficulties in capturing aspects of the true distribution."Natura non facit saltum – Or Are Jumps an Inherent Feature in European Interest Rate Markets?" A jump-enhanced diffusion model for the instantaneous interest rate is estimated on the EURIBOR, LIBOR and STIBOR one-week interest rates via the characteristic function and a Fourier transform to recover the density function. This is compared with an estimated non-jump diffusion model. Both continuous-time and discrete-time versions of the model are estimated. For all three interest rate series, likelihood ratio tests favor the jump-enhanced model at a statistically significant level. This result holds for both the continuous-time and the discrete-time versions of the model."Estimating the Market Price of Risk in European Interest Rate Markets Using Spectral GMM." The market price of risk in European interest rate markets, constituted by the market price of diffusion risk and the market price of jump risk, is estimated for a jump diffusion model, using the characteristic function and the Generalized Method of Moments. Utilized data is the EURIBOR twelve-month interest rate during 1999-2003. The results are in line with earlier studies on US interest rate markets. The estimation technique appears promising in its technical simplicity, but entails practical estimation difficulties such as start-value sensitivity and lack of efficiency.
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| 3. |
- Ahrsjö, Ulrika, 1989-
(author)
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Essays on Economic Disadvantage : Criminal Justice, Gender and Social Mobility
- 2022
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)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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| 4. |
- Almén, Daniel, 1984-
(author)
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Societal Impacts of Modern Conscription : Human Capital, Social Capital and Criminal Behaviour
- 2020
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)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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| 5. |
- Almerud, Jakob, 1984-
(author)
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Public Policy, Household Finance and the Macroeconomy
- 2018
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The thesis contains four separate essays, spanning questions of the interaction between public policy, household finance and the macroeconomy. How does public policy affect macroeconomic outcomes, and the choices and welfare of households, and what are households’ optimal financial responses to changes in macroeconomic environments? Furthermore, the thesis includes a development of a method, which is helpful to answer questions like the ones stated above. The first essay, Optimal Public Policy in a Multi-Sector Economy with Asymmetric Shocks, shows how fiscal policy can complement monetary policy. It is shown that fiscal policy can be used to improve macroeconomic outcomes and make the economy more efficient. Since fiscal policy, in general, includes more instruments than monetary policy, it is possible to neutralize several frictions in the economy simultaneously. This is shown in a general equilibrium model with dynastic households, where firms face monopolistic competition, sticky prices, productivity shocks and cost-push shocks. The second essay, On the Design of Mortgage Default Legislation, asks how different types of mortgage contracts interact with different types of mortgage default policies regarding the probability of a default on home-owner’s mortgage. The different types of mortgage contracts analyzed are fixed rate annuity mortgages, adjustable rate amortized mortgages and adjustable rate non-amortized mortgages. The mortgage default policies span from non-recourse (where the mortgage lender takes all the default risk) to full recourse (where the borrower takes all the default risk). It is shown that a “borrower friendly” non-recourse policy is, as the one implemented in many parts of the United States, not necessarily borrower friendly due to its effect on the risk premium. This is investigated in a model with finitely lived households and an endogenous risk premium. The third essay, On The Empirical Relevance of Cointegration Between Stock Market Returns and Labor Income on Optimal Portfolio Choice, investigates how finitely lived households optimally choose a portfolio consisting of risk-free bonds and risky equity, and how this choice is affected by the long-run correlation between risky (cumulative) equity returns and stochastic labor income. More specifically, I investigate if the empirical cointegration (long-run correlation) between the two variables is strong enough to affect the optimal portfolio choice. It is shown that it is not. Cointegration exists between the two variables, but the speed-of-adjustment back to the cointegration equilibrium is to slow to have a significant effect on the households’ optimal portfolios. The fourth essay, Solving Dynamic Programming Problems Using Stochastic Grids and Nearest-Neighbor Interpolation, describes a new computational method, which is used in the second and third essays. The method is developed to solve models with finitely lived households who face a complex economic environment. Post-state decision rules for the households are used together with simulated stochastic grids over the exogenous variables. By simulating the grids it is possible to reduce the number of grid points that the model is solved for, thereby making it significantly faster to solve models with many exogenous state variables. It is shown that it is possible to solve non-linear life-cycle models including at least eight state variables relatively quickly on a standard desktop computer.
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| 6. |
- Blomqvist, Niklas, 1987-
(author)
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Essays on Labor Economics : The Role of Government in Labor Supply Choices
- 2020
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- "Right to Work Full-time" Policies and Involuntary Part-time EmploymentThis paper investigates the effect of right to full-time policies implemented to decrease involuntary part-time work for public care workers employed by Swedish municipalities. Taking advantage of a staggered decision process, these policies are evaluated using a difference-in-differences approach. Results show that involuntary part-time employment is real and significant, with 10% of part-time employed workers choosing full-time when given the opportunity. The effect mainly comes from a decrease in contracts of <75% of full-time and an increase in contracts of 80% of full-time and above. Further results from the full-time policies show that being more flexible in the choice of hours worked is popular among workers, indicated by an increase in tenure and reduced turnover in municipalities that offer more flexibility in the choice of hours worked.Hours Constraints and Tax Elasticity Estimates - Evidence from Swedish Public Care WorkersThere is a concern that tax elasticity estimates may be downward biased in the presence of optimization frictions for workers. So far, there is limited evidence on the nature of these optimization frictions. This paper provides new insight into one part of the optimization frictions black box, namely hours constraints. Using unique and newly collected data, I exploit a staggered implementation of a policy that gave some public care workers the opportunity to choose their preferred hours of work. Taking advantage of this policy, I estimate differences in tax elasticities between constrained and unconstrained public care workers by comparing bunching at a large tax kink in the Swedish tax system. The empirical evidence points to the conclusion that hours constraints do not affect tax elasticity estimates.Restricting Residence Permits - Short-Run Evidence from a Swedish ReformIn June 2016, the Swedish parliament decided to restrict the granting of permanent residence permits for asylum seekers in Sweden. The new status quo for a refugee is a temporary rather than a permanent residence permit. In a first evaluation of this reform we use a Regression discontinuity analysis in which we follow refugees, aged 25-65, over their first years after arrival. Our main results show that a temporary residence permit increases the probability of working and enrolling in regular education.Mom and Dad Got Jobs: Natural Resources, Economic Activity, and Infant HealthThe impact of local economic shocks, such as the discovery and exploitation of natural resources, on labor markets and health is not well understood. Both positive and negative effects have been documented in the literature. In this paper, we show that the phase before active resource extraction begins directly affects the local economy. This implies that previous estimates – typically based on designs exploiting differences before and after the active phase of extraction begins - may have understated the actual effect of natural resource extraction on outcomes of interest. Using rich data from Sweden combined with differences in the timing and location of mineral exploitation permits, we find a positive impact on female and male employment and earnings and a negative effect on housing prices. Children’s health outcomes are also negatively affected, an effect likely driven by the increase in local economic activity rather than extraction-related externalities.
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| 7. |
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| 8. |
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| 9. |
- Brinca, Pedro Soares, 1979-
(author)
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Essays in Quantitative Macroeconomics
- 2013
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- In the first essay, Distortions in the Neoclassical Growth Model: A Cross Country Analysis, I show that shocks that express themselves as total factor productivity and labor income taxes are comparably more synchronized than shocks that resemble distortions to the ability of allocating resources across time and states of the world. These two shocks are also the most important to model. Lastly, I document the importance of international channels of transmission for the shocks, given that these are spatially correlated and that international trade variables, such as trade openness correlate particularly well with them. The second essay is called Monetary Business Cycle Accounting for Sweden. Given that the analysis is focused in one country, I can extend the prototype economy to include a nominal interest rate setting rule and government bonds. As in the previous essay, distortions to the labor-leisure condition and total factor productivity are the most relevant margins to be modeled, now joined by deviations from the nominal interest rate setting rule. Also, distortions do not share a structural break during the Great Recession, but they do during the 1990’s. Researchers aiming to model Swedish business cycles must take into account the structural changes the Swedish economy went through in the 1990’s, though not so during the last recession. The third essay, Consumer Confidence and Consumption Spending: Evidence for the United States and the Euro Area, we show that, the consumer confidence index can be in certain circumstances a good predictor of consumption. In particular, out-of-sample evidence shows that the contribution of confidence in explaining consumption expenditures increases when household survey indicators feature large changes, so that confidence indicators can have some increasing predictive power during such episodes. Moreover, there is some evidence of a confidence channel in the international transmission of shocks, as U.S. confidence indices help predicting consumer sentiment in the euro area.
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| 10. |
- Cao, Mengyi, 1984-
(author)
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Labor, Trade and Finance : Essays in Applied Economics
- 2017
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)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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| 11. |
- Carlén, Björn, 1965-
(author)
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Studies in climate change policy : theory and experiments
- 2000
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Emission Quota Trade Among the Few: Laboratory Evidence of Joint Implementation Among Committed Countries. The purpose of the laboratory tests reported here is to identify a well-functioning design, tailored for an upcoming unique experiment using real-world relevant decision makers for carbon emission reductions trade among four countries committed to binding carbon emission limits, a form of so-called joint implementation. The design is required to promote high trade efficiency and a limited scope for arbitrage. All designs tested reached high levels of efficiency (87-99 %), which is noteworthy given the small number of traders. Attempts to adjust the design to reduce or eliminate arbitrage were successful in the final test rounds.The Role of Market Power in International Emissions Trading: A Laboratory Experiment. Several policy advisers have expressed concerns that market power will characterize international greenhouse gas emissions trading, especially since presumed large buyers or sellers, e.g., the US or Russia or, eventually, China, would be allowed to trade directly on the market. The experiment reported here mimics a case where twelve countries, one of which is a large buyer, trade carbon emissions on a double auction market and where traders have essentially full information about the underlying net demand. The findings deviate from those of the standard version of market power effects in that trade volumes are efficient and prices are for the most part competitive.Cost-effective Approaches to Attracting Low-Income Countries to International Emissions Trading: Theory and Experiments. The cost-effectiveness of the Kyoto Protocol and any similar non-global climate treaty would be enhanced by attracting as many new countries as possible to international emissions trading and achieving these additions as soon as possible. This paper focuses on two forms of compensation that can be used to attract poor, risk-averse countries to participate in emissions trading. The theoretical as well as experimental evidence presented here suggests that, if poor countries are more risk averse than rich countries, partial compensation in terms of financial transfers is more cost-effective than relying solely on giving the poor countries large emission quotas as has been the case so far. In fact, the theoretical argument for cost-effectiveness indicates that significant parts of the emission quotas to new participating countries should be replaced by financial transfers. Using money for partial compensation would also reduce the risk for 'hot air' allocations and the ensuing political obstacles to cost-effectiveness that such allocations tend to create.On the Interaction Effects of Environmental Policies. Recent literature has shown that environmental policies interact with the tax system in a way that may substantially increase the social cost of environmental control, the so-called interaction effect. So far, this literature has focused on specific types of environmental problems and an interaction effect that arises on the labor market. Allowing for more than one primary factor and other types of environmental problems, other interaction effect may arise. Some of these may reduce the social cost of environmental control. This is so, for example, if inputs that harm the environment when used in one activity are harmless in others, as is the case for some location-specific externalities. In fact, the aggregate interaction effect may well be cost reducing. In addition, it is even possible that the interaction effect on the labor market is cost reducing.
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| 12. |
- Cheung, Maria, 1975-
(author)
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Education, Gender and Media : Empirical Essays in Development Economics
- 2013
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The first essay, Edutainment Radio, Women’s Status and Primary School Participation: Evidence from Cambodia, investigates whether exposure to education-entertainment radio leads to improved women's status and primary school participation. Results show significant behavioral effects related to women's decision-making power and investments in children's primary schooling in exposed areas. Suggestive evidence indicates that gender-related attitudes were affected as well, which is a stepping stone towards changing socially constructed gender norms. The second essay, Who Benefits from Free Education? Long-Term Evidence from a Policy Experiment in Cambodia, investigates the effects of abolishing primary school fees. One additional year of free education had no impact on poor children, but increased the educational attainment for non-poor children. Persistent local educational norms and income segregation may explain why poor students were less likely to progress and complete the higher grades. The third essay, Does Female Education Postpone Fertility? Evidence from a Policy Experiment in Cambodia, investigates the role of female education as a vehicle to postpone early childbearing. Exploiting a policy experiment with differential impact on education, the findings suggest that women who gained more education were associated with fewer births and a postponement of early fertility while no changes in early fertility were observed for unaffected women. The fourth essay, The Impact of a Food for Education Program on Schooling in Cambodia, evaluates three types of FFE interventions gradually implemented in primary schools. Results show that enrollment increased sharply in the short-run but did not lead to higher educational achievements, plausible due to a countervailing class size effect. While these interventions are cost-effective to attract children to school, adjusting school resources accordingly may be important to promote a long-term learning as well.
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| 13. |
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| 14. |
- Ekström, Mathias, 1982-
(author)
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Cues, Conformity, and Choice Architecture : Empirical Essays on Influence
- 2013
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This thesis consists of three papers summarized as follows. “Can Indifference Make the World Greener?” We test whether the default option can nudge people to save resources in a simple, non-dynamic, decision task with only two alternatives, and where people have been explicitly informed about the recommended course of action. In a natural field experiment we switch printers’ default option, from one-sided to two-sided printing, at a random point in time. The results confirm that roughly one third of all printing is determined by the default alternative, and a green default therefore saves resources on average about 15 percent. “Is Liking Contagious?” In this paper we set up a natural field experiment on the social networking service Facebook to study whether people are more prone to Like a status update if someone else has done so before. We distinguish between three treatments: (i) one unknown person Likes the update, (ii) three unknown persons Like the update and (iii) the most connected person Likes the update. Whereas the first condition had no effect, the latter two more than doubled the probability to press the Like button, implying that both the number of predecessors and social proximity matters. Neither limited attention, nor observational learning, is consistent with the results. Conformity is therefore the most plausible mechanism behind our finding. “Do Watching Eyes Affect Charitable Giving? Evidence from a Field Experiment” The presence of implicit observation cues, such as picture of eyes, has been shown to increase generosity in dictator games, and cooperative behavior in field settings. In this paper I test if a picture of watching eyes affects unconditional giving in a natural environment, where the recipient is a charity organization. This setting avoids: (i) experimenter demand effects, (ii) that the facial cue reminds subjects of a human counterpart, and (iii) a social multiplier effect. I find no general effect, but during days when relatively few other people visited a store the picture of eyes increased donated amount by 30 percent. This result indicates that subtle social cues can invoke reputation concerns in humans.
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| 15. |
- Engström, Gustav, 1977-
(author)
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Essays on Economic Modeling of Climate Change
- 2012
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Structural change in a two-sector model of the climate and the economy introduces issues concerning substitutability among goods in a two-sector economic growth model where emissions from fossil fuels give rise to a climate externality. Substitution is modeled using a CES-production function where the intermediate inputs differ only in their technologies and the way they are affected by the climate externality. I derive a simple formula for optimal taxes and resource allocation over time and highlight model sensitivity w.r.t the elasticity of substitution and distribution parameters.Energy Balance Climate Models and General Equilibrium Optimal Mitigation Policies develops a one-dimensional energy balance climate model with heat diffusion and anthropogenic forcing across latitudes driven by global fossil fuel use coupled to an economic growth model. Our results suggest that if the implementation of international transfers across latitudes are not possible or costly, then optimal taxes are in general spatially non-uniform and may be lower at poorer latitudes. Energy Balance Climate Models, Damage Reservoirs and the Time Profileof Climate Change Policy explores optimal mitigation policies through the lens of a latitude dependent energy balance climate model coupled to an economic growth model. We associate the movement of an endogenous polar ice cap with the idea of a damage reservoir being a finite source of climate related damages affecting the economy. The analysis shows that the introduction of damage reservoirs can generate multiple steady states and Skiba points.Assessing Sustainable Development in a DICE World investigates a method for assessing sustainable development under climate change in the Dynamic Integrated model of Climate and the Economy (DICE-2007 model). The analysis shows that the sustainability measure is highly sensitive to the calibration of the inter-temporal elasticity parameter and discount rate of the social welfare function.
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| 16. |
- Fausch, Jürg, 1982-
(author)
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Essays on Financial Markets and the Macroeconomy
- 2017
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Asset pricing implications of a DSGE model with recursive preferences and nominal rigidities. I study jointly macroeconomic dynamics and asset prices implied by a production economy featuring nominal price rigidities and Epstein-Zin (1989) preferences. Using a reasonable calibration, the macroeconomic DSGE model is consistent with a number of stylized facts observed in financial markets like the equity premium, a negative real term spread, a positive nominal term spread and the predictability of stock returns, without compromising the model's ability to fit key macroeconomic variables. The interest rate smoothing in the monetary policy rule helps generate a low risk-free rate volatility which has been difficult to achieve for standard real business cycle models where monetary policy is neutral. In an application, I show that the model provides a framework for analyzing monetary policy interventions and the associated effects on asset prices and the real economy.Macroeconomic news and the stock market: Evidence from the eurozone. This paper is an empirical study of excess return behavior in the stock market in the euro area around days when important macroeconomic news about inflation, unemployment or interest rates are scheduled for announcement. I identify state dependence such that equity risk premia on announcement days are significantly higher when the interests rates are in the vicinity of the zero lower bound. Moreover, I provide evidence that for the whole sample period, the average excess returns in the eurozone are only higher on days when FOMC announcements are scheduled for release. However, this result vanishes in a low interest rate regime. Finally, I document that the European stock market does not command a premium for scheduled announcements by the European Central Bank (ECB).The impact of ECB monetary policy surprises on the German stock market. We examine the impact of ECB monetary policy surprises on German excess stock returns and the possible reasons for such a response. First, we conduct an event study to asses the impact of conventional and unconventional monetary policy on stock returns. Second, within the VAR framework of Campbell and Ammer (1993), we decompose excess stock returns into news regarding expected excess returns, future dividends and future real interest rates. We measure conventional monetary policy shocks using futures markets data. Our main findings are that the overall variation in German excess stock returns mainly reflects revisions in expectations about dividends and that the stock market response to monetary policy shocks is dependent on the prevailing interest rate regime. In periods of negative real interest rates, a surprise monetary tightening leads to a decrease in excess stock returns. The channels behind this response are news about higher expected excess returns and lower future dividends.
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| 17. |
- Forsfält, Tomas, 1964-
(author)
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Timing options and taxation : essays on the economics of firm creation and tax evasion
- 1999
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Taxation of Small Firms under Uncertainty: A Real Option View of Firm CreationThis paper addresses the impact of the tax system on the incentives to become self-employed. The new approach here is that the creation of a firm is assumed to be an opportunity but not an obligation, that is, a real option. A comprehensive income tax system and a “dual” tax system of the Nordic type are compared. The comprehensive system yields a higher threshold with respect to creating a firm than the dual system.Swedish data on disposable income for different socio-economic groups are used to evaluate the relevance of the critical assumptions in the model and to find parameter estimates. A result is that the assumptions are consistent with data for white-collar labor but not for blue-collar labor.The Effects of Risk Aversion and Age on Investments in New FirmsHow does the age of risk-averse individuals affect investments in private projects? This question is analyzed under the assumption that such individuals have to invest a large fraction of their personal wealth in order to establish a new firm. Thresholds conditional on age that trigger a switch from one asset to another are derived in a continuous-time portfolio choice model with zero-or-one choices. As the investor gets older - and depending on random events - not only wealth, but also the thresholds, might increase. Thus, there are two counteracting effects on the likelihood of becoming an entrepreneur.Tax Evasion: A Real Option ApproachA theoretical model of excise tax evasion is developed in this paper. The dynamics of a change in tax policy is derived, under the assumption that consumers benefit from a lower price when entering a “black market”. However, entry also imposes a sunk cost, which gives rise to asymmetric effects and persistence effects on both aggregate demand and on tax revenues. An increase in the tax rate instantaneously brings more entrants into the black market, whereas a tax cut has no short-run effects on the fraction of the population that has access to the black market.
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| 18. |
- Fridolfsson, Sven-Olof, 1968-
(author)
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Essays on endogenous merger theory
- 2001
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This thesis consists of a collection of essays on endogenous merger theory.Why Mergers Reduce Profits, and Raise Share Prices - A Theory of Preemptive Mergers. The empirical puzzle why mergers reduce profits, and raise share prices is explained in this essay. If being an "insider" is better than being an "outsider," firms may merge to preempt their partner merging with a rival. The stock-value of the insiders is increased, since the risk of becoming an outsider is eliminated. These results are derived in an endogenous merger model.Why Event Studies Do Not Detect Anti-Competitive Mergers. Anti-competitive mergers increase competitors' profits, since they reduce competition. Using a model of endogenous mergers, it is shown that such mergers nevertheless may reduce the competitors' share-prices. Thus, event-studies can not detect anti-competitive mergers.Should Mergers be Controlled? Anti-competitive mergers benefit competitors more than the merging firms. Such externalities are shown to reduce firms' incentives to merge (a holdup mechanism). Firms delay merger proposals, thereby foregoing valuable profits and hoping other firms will merge instead - a war of attrition. The final result, however, is an overly concentrated market. This essay also demonstrates a surprising intertemporal link: merger incentives may be reduced by the prospect of additional profitable mergers in the future. Merger control may help protect competition. Holdup and intertemporal links make policy design more difficult, however. Even reasonable policies may be worse than not controlling mergers at all.Anti-Competitive versus Pro-Competitive Mergers. In a framework where mergers are mutually excluding, firms are shown to pursue anti-competitive rather than (alternative) pro-competitive mergers. Potential outsiders to anti-competitive mergers refrain from pursuing pro-competitive mergers if the positive externalities from anti-competitive mergers are strong enough. Potential outsiders to pro-competitive mergers pursue anti-competitive mergers if the negative externalities from the pro-competitive mergers are strong enough. Potential participants in anti-competitive mergers are cheap targets due to the risk of becoming outsiders to pro-competitive mergers. Firms may even pursue an unprofitable and anti-competitive merger, when alternative mergers are profitable and pro-competitive.A Consumers' Surplus Defense in Merger Control. A government wanting to promote an efficient allocation of resources as measured by the total surplus, should strategically delegate to its competition authority a welfare standard with a bias in favour of consumers. A consumer bias means that some welfare increasing mergers will be blocked. This is optimal, if the relevant alternative to the merger is another change in market structure that will even further increase the total surplus. Furthermore, a consumer bias is shown to be optimal even though it increases the likelihood of forbidding mergers that maximize the total surplus
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| 19. |
- Fukushima, Nanna, 1978-
(author)
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Essays on the Economics of the 1956 Clean Air Act
- 2021
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This thesis consists of three essays in environmental and health economics.The UK Clean Air Act, Black Smoke, and Infant MortalityThis paper estimates the effects of the 1956 UK Clean Air Act on infant mortality. Using novel data, I exploit the seasonality in demand for coal to analyze the effects of a staggered expansion of a ban on local smoke emission. The findings show that the policy eliminated the seasonal difference in air quality as well as infant mortality. According to my instrumental variables estimates, the reduction in air pollution between 1957 and 1973 can account for 70 % of the observed decline in infant mortality during the same period. The results are relevant to explain the fast decline in post-war infant mortality in developed countries and understand the effect of pollution on infant mortality in many developing countries.A Fine Solution to Air Pollution?This paper studies the effect of an exogenous change in air pollution regulation enforcement on regulation compliance. I exploit the spatial and temporal variation in the roll-out of zonal bans on smoke from coal in densely populated areas in England between 1963 – 1973 to study the effect of regulation on air pollution when the monetary punishment if convicted is doubled. I find that the increase in fine size increased the effect of the regulation on air pollution by 37 percent. However, evidence suggests that the poorest households disproportionally carried the cost of the marginal improvement in air quality from an increase in fine. The findings highlight the distributional concerns associated when designing an effective environmental regulation.Environmental Regulation and Firm PerformanceThis paper investigates the effect of environmental regulation in England in the 1960 – 70s on changes in employment and the entry and exit of manufacturing plants. It matches 1 km2 grid resolution plant data for multiple years with novel data on the location and timing of a roll-out of a ban on bituminous coal, the leading source of energy and heating in industry at the time. I show that the regulation negatively affected employment in low-productive plants but increased the probability of survival, employment, and the entry of high-productive plants. I present a simple theoretical model with heterogeneous firms and find empirical evidence in line with model predictions.
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| 20. |
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| 21. |
- Hallsten, Kerstin, 1963-
(author)
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Essays on the effects of monetary policy
- 1999
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This dissertation consists of three essays, each of which addresses issues that are relevant to the implementation of monetary policy.The first essay, "Bank Loans and the Transmission Mechanism of Monetary Policy," considers one of the transmission mechanisms of monetary policy, the bank lending channel. This mechanism is analysed and estimated. The theory emphasises the role of banks. Banks are important because of asymmetric information in the financial market and because banks are assumed to handle this problem better than other lenders. Banks therefore give loans to borrowers that, because they are subject to asymmetric information problems, find it costly or perhaps impossible to issue bonds in the private bond market. Loans from an intermediary and bonds issued at the bond market can therefore not be seen as perfect substitutes, which is often assumed in the macro economic literature. Further also banks find loans and bonds to be imperfect substitutes since it is assumed that it is costly for a bank to change the relation between the possession of bonds and loans in its portfolio.By changing the amount of deposits and thereby the availability of loans in the bank sector the central bank influences aggregate demand in the economy through a bank lending channel, assuming prices are temporarily sticky. Under certain conditions it follows that the bank lending channel works in line with the ordinary money channel and the effect of monetary policy on aggregate income is hence enhanced.It is then tested for the importance of this channel using Swedish data. As predicted by the bank lending channel the mix between bank loans and other sources of financing and the spread between the loan rate and the bond rate are significantly altered after a change in the stance of monetary policy. Real effects are tested for simultaneously. It follows that both the mix and the spread have real effects on the economy and that the effects of monetary policy is enhanced. A number of countries have adopted inflation targeting in various forms as the framework for monetary policy. Even if the arguments for inflation targeting have been widely accepted, many problems of how to implement such a policy in practice remain to be solved. The second essay, "Implications of Inflation Targeting," contains an analysis of how the central bank should set its operating instruments in order to control its target(s). It is also analysed for how long the actual and the targeted inflation rate can be accepted to deviate under different policy regimes and how different stabilisation goals affect the variability in inflation, output and the short term interest rate. For that purpose a simple model for the Swedish economy is estimated.The third essay is entitled "An Expectations-Augmented Phillips Curve in an Open Economy." Here an expectations-augmented Phillips curve relation in an open economy is derived and estimated. As in Rotemberg's (1982) model firms are assumed to face quadratic price adjustment costs. In addition, second-order costs of changing prices are included. Consequently the derived inflation equation incorporates not only a forward-looking component but also a backward-looking element. The model is then estimated on Swedish data. The results from this estimation shed light on the importance of inflation expectations, in comparison to past inflation rates, for the development of current inflation. This is, for example, of great importance to a central bank trying to achieve an inflation target. A common characteristic of inflation targeting models is that with a lower degree of persistence in inflation, a credible central bank can achieve its inflation target with relatively little loss in output.
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| 22. |
- Jackson, David, 1973-
(author)
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Enforcing Social Norms : How Economics Shapes Reputation and Social Punishment
- 2024
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This thesis investigates how the economic environment shapes levels of trust and cooperation and the nature of norm enforcement. The idea that many social norms can be understood as an effective response to challenges presented by the economic and ecological environment has significant empirical support. However, few theoretical models study this relationship in detail.Many existing models of reputation are driven by imperfect information. However, information frictions are often assumed rather than derived. The first paper 'Reputation on Networks', uses a network model to investigate how the structure of a communication network affects the value of reputation. The results suggest an inverted U-shaped relationship between trust and the level of clustering in a network. High levels of clustering limit the number of potential partners agents have access to and lower the value of reputation. While, when networks become too open trust is undermined because agents become information gatekeepers for their reputation.The second paper 'Reputation, Punishment and the Informal Enforcement of Norms', looks at informal enforcement when reputation and costly social punishment are considered within the same framework. The results suggest a complementary relationship between these two forms of social punishment. Because reputation leverages a third-party punishment threat over many future interactions, the mechanism provides a novel and compelling explanation of costly third-party and altruistic punishment. Unlike other models, the theory provides predictions about the overall intensity of social punishment and how this varies with the combined package of behaviours a community regulates using social norms.The third paper 'Ingroup Norms and Relation Specific Punishment', considers when agents can maintain or renegotiate trust with a defector, either bilaterally or within an identifiable group. These agents will adopt an ingroup norm such that members who defect outside the group are still trusted within it. The results detail when agents are individually motivated to punish their friends and ingroup members to support reputation-based trust beyond the group. The analysis provides a novel explanation for ingroup bias and details the conditions for inter-group trust and where relation-specific or ingroup norms will be adopted over universal ones.
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| 23. |
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| 24. |
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| 25. |
- Jansson, Joakim, 1986-
(author)
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We are (not) anonymous : Essays on anonymity, discrimination and online hate
- 2018
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Haters gonna hate? - Anonymity, misogyny and hate against foreigners in online discussions on political topics. A crucial aspect of freedom of expression is anonymity, but anonymity is a contentious matter. It enables individuals to discuss without fear of repercussions, but anonymity can also lead to hateful writings threatening other's freedom. In this paper, we predict hateful content as well as estimate the causal link between anonymity and hateful content in civic discussions online. First, we make use of a supervised machine-learning model to predict hate in general, hate against foreigners and hate against females and feminists on a dominating Swedish Internet discussion forum. Second, using a difference-in-difference model we show that an exogenous decrease in anonymity leads to less hateful content in general hate and hate against foreigners, but an increase in hate against females and feminists. The mechanisms behind the changes is a combination of a decrease in writing hateful, as well as a decrease in writing in general and a substitution of hate against one group to another.Gender grading bias at Stockholm University: quasi-experimental evidence from an anonymous grading reform. In this paper, we first present novel evidence of grading bias against women at the university level. This is in contrast to previous results at the secondary education level. Contrary to the gender composition at lower levels of education in Sweden, the teachers and graders at the university level are predominantly male. Thus, an in-group bias mechanism could consistently explain the evidence from both the university and secondary education level. However, we find that in-group bias can only explain approximately 20 percent of the total grading bias effect at the university level.Anticipation Effects of a Board Room Gender Quota Law: Evidence from a Credible Threat in Sweden. Board room quota laws have recently received an increasing amount of attention. However, laws are typically anticipated and firms can react before the effective date. This paper provides new results on female board participation and firm performance in Sweden due to a credible threat of a quota law enacted by the Swedish deputy prime minister. The threat caused a substantial and rapid increase in the share of female board members in firms listed on the Stockholm stock exchange. This increase was accompanied by an increase in different measures of firm performance in the same years, which were related to higher sales and lower labor costs. The results highlight that anticipatory effects of a law could be detrimental to the analysis.Differences in prison sentencing between the genders and immigration background in Sweden: discrepancies and possible explanations. I use data on punished drunk drivers to document differences in sentencing for the same crime between immigrants and native born and males and females respectively. Differences in past criminal activity or other individual observables can not explain the difference in sentencing. Instead, the difference between immigrants and native born seem to be due to statistical discrimination, while differences in recidivism rates might explain the gender difference. However, the higher incarceration rate for immigrants does not reduce their future number of crimes.
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| 26. |
- Johan, Egebark, 1980-
(author)
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Taxes, Nudges, and Conformity : Essays in Labor and Behavioral Economics
- 2015
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This thesis consists of four papers summarized as follows.Do Payroll Tax Cuts Raise Youth Employment? We study whether payroll tax reductions are an effective means to raise youth employment. In 2007, the Swedish employer-paid payroll tax was cut on a large scale for young workers, substantially reducing labor costs for this group. Using the variation in payroll taxes across cohorts, we estimate a significant, but small, impact both on employment and on wages.Effects of Taxes on Youth Self-Employment and Income. I examine the link between taxes and youth self-employment. I make use of a Swedish reform that made the payroll tax and the self-employment tax vary by age. The results suggest that youth self-employment is insensitive to tax reductions, both in the short run and in the somewhat longer run. For those defined as self-employed, I find positive effects on income from self-employment, and negative effects on income from wage employment.Can Indifference Make the World Greener? We conducted a natural field experiment at a large university in Sweden to evaluate the effects of two resource conservation programs. The first intervention consisted of a campaign that actively tried to convince people to cut back on printing in general, and to use double-sided printing whenever possible. The second intervention exploited people's tendency to stick with pre-set alternatives. At random points in time we changed the printers’ default settings, from single-sided to double-sided printing. Whereas the moral appeal had no impact, the default change cut paper use by 15 percent.The Origins of Behavioral Contagion: Evidence from a Field Experiment on Facebook. We explore the micro-level foundations of behavioral contagion by running a natural field experiment on the networking site Facebook. Members of Facebook express positive support to content on the website by clicking a Like button. We show that users are more prone to support content if someone else has done so before.
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| 27. |
- Kessel, Dany, 1982-
(author)
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School Choice, School Performance and School Segregation : Institutions and Design
- 2018
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)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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| 28. |
- Khoban, Roza, 1989-
(author)
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Globalization and Development : The Impact of International Trade on Political and Social Institutions
- 2021
-
Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The Impact of Trade Liberalization in the Presence of Political DistortionsPolitical 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 increased 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. The 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.Importing Gender EqualityGender equality remains low in many developing countries and can partly be explained by social norms. In this paper, I investigate whether trade and, in particular import, can shift gender norms. Specifically, I study whether trading and interacting with firms in countries with higher gender equality can affect firms' gender composition in India. I construct a global industry-level index of gender equality and exploit India's trade liberalization in the 1990s to study the trade-induced increased exposure to other countries' gender norms. I find that tariff reductions increased the probability of having a female worker only for firms in industries with higher exposure to gender equality. The effect is stronger for firms in industries with higher exposure to gender equality that, to a greater extent, use relationship-specific input goods. Taken together, the results suggest that trade-induced increased exposure to other countries' gender equality can influence firms' gender composition among workers.Trade-Induced Protests: Evidence from the Brazilian Trade LiberalizationThis paper examines whether trade liberalization can induce shifts in citizens' willingness to mobilize and participate in protests. Specifically, I study the regional effects of Brazil's trade liberalization in the 1990s. I show that regions that were exposed to larger tariff reductions experienced a relative increase in protests. Protests increased in harder-hit regions almost immediately after the liberalization, and the effect is amplified over time. By studying potential mechanisms, I show that the surge in protests follows the pattern of the trade-induced increase in income inequality and reductions in government spending.
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| 29. |
- Knutsson, Daniel, 1981-
(author)
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Public Health Programmes, Healthcare and Child Health
- 2018
-
Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)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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| 30. |
- Laun, Lisa, 1981-
(author)
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Studies on Social Insurance, Income Taxation and Labor Supply
- 2012
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)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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| 31. |
- Linderoth, Anna, 1983-
(author)
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Essays on Men's Preferences and Gender Inequality in the Labor Market
- 2023
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Reference Points for Men’s Parental Leave-Taking Behavior:Evidence from Swedish ReformsThis paper tests the hypothesis of reference dependence in men's parental leave takeup. Using register data, I leverage two reforms introducing earmarked provision for fathers. A key empirical challenge in separating reference point behavior arises from the fact that the earmark provisions also altered men's financial incentives to bunch around the value of the provision. To address this issue, I net out behavioral responses to the financial incentives by calculating and controlling for their size and exploiting the fact that financial incentives remained unchanged for sub-groups of households. The findings reveal that introducing reference points through earmark provisions led to a substantial increase in the average number of parental leave days taken per man (the intensive margin) and an elevated likelihood that men would take any parental leave (the extensive margin). In comparison, responses to the financial incentives are modest. The effect of reference dependence was most pronounced immediately after the reforms but gradually declined as men's parental leave takeup increasingly exceeded the earmarked provision.Too Many Female Colleagues For Comfort? Men’s Tipping Behavior and Gender Segregation Across Workplaces.Women and men tend to work in different workplaces, and this gender segregation is an important contributor to the gender wage gap. This paper studies a new explanation for workplace gender segregation, namely that men leave the workplace when the share of women reaches a certain point. I draw on past research on occupation-level tipping to detect potential composition levels—tipping points—where the share of men in a workplace starts dropping discontinuously over time. This analysis uses Swedish register data for all small- and medium-size workplaces from 1986 to 2009 and is carried out separately by men's level of education (high or low). I find strong non-linear patterns for high-skilled men but not for low-skilled ones. The distribution of candidate tipping points for high-skilled workplaces is centered around 25% to 35% female. Using enlistment data, I find a significant decrease in men's cognitive and non-cognitive skills at tipping point. I draw on my empirical findings to show how compositional preferences can be built into a simple model of self-selection. The model explains the observed negative selection of men after a workplace has exceeded a critical tipping point. The result of this paper emphasizes the potential importance of the preferences of the dominant group.Occupational Gender Segregation and Men's Tipping Behavior: the Swedish Case.The division of occupations along gender lines seems to be a common and persistent feature between countries, despite differences in social norms and institutional settings across time. The aim of this paper is to investigate one possible explanation, namely tipping behaviour in occupations. It studies the non-linear dynamics of occupation segregation, applying an approach similar to regression discontinuity design. This paper studies tipping behaviour in the Swedish labour market from 1960 to 1990 and compares it to the results for the U.S. using an analogous methodology. The graphical approach exhibits a highly non-linear relationship in female share. I find candidate tipping points that range between 9 to 32 percent in female share. The results indicate discontinuous changes in net male employment growth at candidate tipping point.
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| 32. |
- Lindgren, Erik, 1981-
(author)
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One coin - One vote : the rural political power shift that pushed Sweden towards industrialization
- 2022
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The Causal Effect of Political Power on the Provision of Public Education: Evidence from a Weighted Voting SystemWe estimate how political power affects the provision of public education in local governments, using data from a nondemocratic society where voters received votes in proportion to their taxable income. This was the system used in Swedish local governments during the period 1862–1909. We use two different identification strategies, a threshold regression analysis and a generalized event-study design, both of which exploit nonlinearities or discontinuities in the effect of political power between two opposing local elites: agricultural landowners and emerging industrialists. The results suggest that school spending is approximately 90–120% higher if the non-agrarian interest controls all of the votes compared to when landowners have a majority.The Causal Effect of Transport Infrastructure: Evidence from a New Historical DatabaseWe analyze the effect of railroad investments on economic growth and find large effects of having access to railways. For real non-agricultural income, the cumulative treatment effect is approximately 130% after 30 years. We also show that the effect is likely to reflect growth rather than a reorganization of existing economic activity since no spillover effects between treated and untreated regions are found. Our results are consistent with the big push hypothesis that argues that simultaneous and coordinated investment can generate economic growth if there are strong aggregate demand externalities. We corroborate this mechanism by using plant-level data and find that investments in local railways significantly increase local industrial production and employment.The Political Economics of Growth, Labor Control and Coercion: Evidence from a Suffrage Reform Here we analyze the breadth of Sweden’s industrial, economic and social development from the 1860s to the 1910s. By using a novel constructed historical dataset of approximately 2,400 Swedish local governments we find that the change in suffrage affected several outcomes at the local level. These outcomes include factor price manipulation in the form of entry barriers such as investments in local public education and transportation; technology adoption and labor productivity in agriculture and industry; changes in the real wage structure, composition of employment, and the structure of production; organized labor and labor coercion; demographic transition; and persistence in dysfunctional local political institutions. Our results support the idea that political institutions are a key determinant of long-term development and growth. Precipitation and Infant Mortality: Evidence from Sweden 1881–1950I analyze the dynamic effects of precipitation on infant mortality, using a panel dataset containing monthly mortality data from approximately 2,150 Swedish parishes and monthly precipitation levels collected at a number of weather stations around the country. Given that I use data from 1881 to 1950, the size of this novel panel dataset is considerable. Parishes have been matched to the closest weather station for every given month. Given that precipitation, is neither binary nor constant, a binned event-study design is used to estimate the dynamic effects with respect to the precipitation intensity. The results show that increased precipitation decreases infant mortality for both male and female infants. The dynamic effect after 4 months is about 8 percent.
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| 33. |
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| 34. |
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| 35. |
- Lorentzon, Louise, 1987-
(author)
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Empirical Essays on Public Policies : Social Insurances, Safety Nets, and Health Care
- 2020
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Screening Efficiency in Sickness Insurance: Evidence from a Spell Limit ReformI estimate the effects of the removal of a limit on sick leave spells in the Swedish Sickness Insurance program, on labor market outcomes and sick leave. The removal of the spell limit led to longer sick leave spells. I also find that the removal led to a reduction in the share of people who are neither working, nor receiving sickness benefits. A conceptual framework is used to interpret the results in terms of benefits screening efficiency, which is found to increase through the removal of the spell limit. The identification is based on a regression discontinuity design, using the timing of sick leave start dates and the abolition of the spell limit.Long-Term Effects of Cash Transfers: Evidence from a Swedish ReformDo short-term cash transfers to the poor deliver long-term benefits? This paper studies a unique program introduced in Sweden in the 1930s. The program made large transfers – on average approximately 30 percent of total income in the collected sample – to widows with children. Income and family-size thresholds, combined with child age cutoffs, generate plausibly exogenous variation in program exposure. By digitizing and linking historical records to later administrative datasets, I study the long-term effects of this program. Focusing on life expectancy, I find no significant long-term effects; however, the estimates are imprecisely measured due to the limited sample size.Inertia of Dominated Pension Investments: Evidence from an Information InterventionIn this paper we empirically investigate potential causes of imperfect competition in the fund market, as characterized by high price dispersion among comparable funds. We discriminate between three main hypotheses on the demand side: a lack of awareness of price dispersion, search costs, and financial illiteracy. A large-scale field experiment is conducted in the Swedish Premium Pension system. Information letters are sent to pension savers in two index funds, where there exists a cheaper fund with the same index strategy. We show that an information intervention that increases awareness of a cheaper, dominating fund, and reduces search costs to find such an alternative, can significantly improve households’ real investment allocations. Nonetheless, a vast majority of savers who are sent information about the name of the dominating fund do not switch funds. Thus, the high degree of inertia in pension investments remains even when search friction for identifying dominating alternatives are eliminated.Midwives and Maternal Mortality: Evidence from a Midwifery Policy Experiment in 19th Century SwedenThis paper estimates the effect of a historical midwifery policy experiment on maternal mortality, infant mortality, and stillbirth during the period from 1830 to 1894 in Sweden. Exploiting sharp changes or “discontinuities” across time and place in the availability of trained and licensed midwives as an exogenous source of variation, we find that a doubling of trained midwives leads to a 20-40 percent reduction in maternal mortality and to a 20 percent increase in the uptake of midwife-assisted homebirths. The results thus suggest that a 1 percent increase in the share of midwife-assisted homebirths decreases maternal mortality by as much as 2 percent, which is a remarkable finding given that midwife training was only 6-12 months at that time. The results of this study contribute to the current debate about the most effective strategy to reduce the unacceptably high rate of maternal mortality in many developing countries, especially in low-resource settings.
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| 36. |
- Malafry, Laurence, 1982-
(author)
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Inequality and Macroeconomic Policy : Essays on Climate, Immigration and Fiscal Intervention
- 2018
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This thesis consists of four self-contained essays in economics.Optimal Climate Policy with Household Wealth Inequality. Policy makers concerned with setting optimal carbon taxes to address climate change externalities often employ integrated assessment models (IAMs). While these models differ on their assumptions of climate damage impacts, discounting and technology, they conform on their assumption of complete markets and a representative household. In the face of global inequality and significant vulnerability of asset poor households, I relax the complete markets assumption and introduce a realistic degree of global household inequality. A simple experiment of introducing a range of global carbon taxes shows a household's position on the global wealth distribution predicts the identity of their most preferred carbon price.Immigration Shocks, Equilibrium Unemployment and Inequality. The purpose of this paper is to present a proof-of-concept model for assessing the impact of immigration shocks on a country's equilibrium unemployment, wages and inequality. The model implements labour market matching in the workhorse heterogeneous agent macro model with precautionary savings. In this setting, I perform several transition experiments exploring the channels and mechanisms through which a substantial immigration shock affects macroeconomic outcomes, including conditional welfare and economic integration. I find that the identity of the immigration cohort, as well as, features of the receiving economy matter for both the magnitude and direction of the response.Fiscal Multipliers in the 21st Century. Fiscal multipliers appear to vary greatly over time and space. Based on VARs for a large number of countries, we document a strong correlation between wealth inequality and the magnitude of fiscal multipliers. In an attempt to account for this finding, we develop a life-cycle, overlapping-generations economy with uninsurable labor market risk. We calibrate our model to match key characteristics of a number of OECD economies, including the distribution of wages and wealth, social security, taxes, and government debt and study how a fiscal multiplier depends on various country characteristics. We find that the fiscal multiplier is highly sensitive to the fraction of the population who face binding credit constraints and also to the average wealth level in the economy. These findings together help us generate a cross-country pattern of multipliers that is quite similar to that in the data.Fiscal Consolidation Programs and Income Inequality. Following the Great Recession, many European countries implemented fiscal consolidation policies aimed at reducing government debt. Using three different empirical approaches, we document a strong positive relationship between higher income inequality and stronger recessive impacts of fiscal consolidation. To explain this finding, we develop a life-cycle, overlapping generations economy with uninsurable labor market risk. We calibrate our model to match key characteristics of a number of European economies, including the distribution of wages and wealth, and study the effects of fiscal consolidation programs. We find that higher income risk induces precautionary savings behavior, which decreases the proportion of credit-constrained agents in the economy. Our model produces a cross-country correlation between inequality and the fiscal consolidation multipliers in line with the data.
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| 37. |
- Molla, Kiflu Gedefe, 1978-
(author)
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Essays in International trade, exchange rates and prices
- 2017
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)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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| 38. |
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| 39. |
- Norbäck, Pehr-Johan, 1960-
(author)
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Multinational Firms, Technology and Location
- 1998
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This thesis consists of four essays. Its main theme is the location of production in multinational firms.Subsidizing away exports? -- A note on strategic trade policy}% , investigates how strategic trade policy arguments for R\&D subsidies are altered when firms are multinational rather than national. Using a standard model, where a home firm and a foreign firm compete in exports on an international market, it is shown that cost-reducing R\&D subsidies by the home government to the home firm indeed increase this firm's market share. However, the subsidy can also eliminate export production in the home country, as production is shifted abroad.Strategic R\&D policy, domestic unionization and multinational firms}, extends the model in the first essay to include labor market effects. Labor is unionized in the home firm and wage and employment are derived using the efficient Nash-Bargaining solution. In this environment, R\&D subsidies will also improve the firm's bargaining position against the union, as the improved technology can be used abroad in the case of a break-down of negotiations, when production is shifted abroad. Whether this effect increases the firm's market share and domestic welfare depends on union preferences.Multinational firms, technology and location} generalizes the above model into a full three-stage game where both firms choose (i) their respective technology, by deciding on a level of R\&D, (ii) whether this technology is to be used in a domestic or a in local plant and (iii) the quantity produced and sold on the market. If technology transfer costs are fixed, ``high-tech'' firms tend to produce abroad, but if such costs are associated with the level of R\&D, high-tech firms tend to export. An empirical analysis using a data set of Swedish multinational firms, confirms the latter prediction.Cumulative effects of labor market distortions in a developing country} considers a small open economy where an input-output industrial structure, scale economies and imperfect competition, create vertical linkages and multiple equilibria. In this environment, an imperfect labor market is introduced by assuming unionized labor. It is shown that if the vertical linkages are sufficiently strong, a deregulation of the labor market may trigger a large, discontinuous expansion of industrial output, as reduced wage-costs start a circular, cumulative process in which the expansions of the up-and downstream industries promote each other.
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| 40. |
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| 41. |
- 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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| 42. |
- Olme, Elisabet, 1986-
(author)
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Essays on Educational Choices and Integration
- 2019
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)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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| 43. |
- Olofsson, Jon, 1986-
(author)
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An Economic Backbone of Development : Essays in Financial and Political Economy
- 2023
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The thesis consists of three self-contained essays.Local Banking and Historical Innovation: the Effect of Swedish Savings BanksHow does access to credit affect innovation at the early stages of development? This essay uses digitized records from the Swedish savings banks movement, in combination with novel data on the universe of historical patenting, to study how savings banks affected innovation in Sweden between 1900 and 1949, a period when the country was still a developing economy. The empirical strategy exploits local variation in the openings and closings of the savings banks. Municipalities with bank presence experienced increased innovation, measured by more patents from innovators seated in the municipality. In particular, the head offices of the banks impacted innovation, as they were the executive unit and administered lending. Patents from industries more dependent on financing from external sources are driving the effect, along with places with a relatively high population, a developed industry, and a previous history of innovation. The results emphasize the importance of financial institutions with strong local ties and the ability to encourage and redirect savings to promote innovation in developing economies.The Effects of Local Banking: Historical Evidence from the Swedish Savings Bank MovementWhat is the long-term effect of local banking on industrial growth and economic progress in a developing economy? We shed light on this question using rich data covering the staggered rollout of the Swedish savings bank movement and information on industrial development, population statistics, and mortality in 2400 Swedish municipalities during the first half of the 20th century. The first part of the empirical analysis shows that the presence of a savings bank substantially affected industry structure and industry growth by increasing the number of firms, the degree of mechanization, and industry sales value. More advanced industries, reliant on external financing, experienced the most substantial impact. The second part shows that the savings banks also impacted general economic development, captured by population growth and reduced infant and child mortality. The study provides novel insights into the merits of local banking systems in the early stages of economic development.Lethal Police Violence and the Public Perception of the Police: Evidence from US CountiesThe public perception of the police is significant for the validity of the democratic system. Compared to white citizens, Afro-Americans have low confidence in the police. They are also more likely to fall victim to police violence with lethal outcomes. Therefore, ethnicity and group identity may influence how the public views police violence and, by extension, how police violence affects public perceptions. This essay explores this relationship using the timing of an individual-level survey and the occurrence of local police killings. Survey participants interviewed after a police killing of a black victim obtained worse attitudes toward the police. Mainly black participants and those who are young and have a high income or education level induce the effect. In contrast, events with non-black victims elevate the status of the police among non-black respondents and those with a lower level of education. The results are consistent with group identity theory and provide insight into how controversial events affect confidence in a political institution.
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| 44. |
- Olsson, Martin, 1978-
(author)
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Essays on Employment Protection, Private Equity and Spousal Behavior
- 2012
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This thesis consists of four papers, summarized as follows. “Employment Protection and Sickness Absence” An exemption in the Swedish Employment Security Act in 2001 allows employers with at most ten employees to exempt two workers from the seniority rule at times of redundancies. The exemption is found to decrease sickness absence by more than 13% at those establishments that were treated relative to those that were not and this was due to a behavioral, rather than a compositional, effect. “Employment Protection and Parental Childcare” I examine if employment protection affects parental childcare. I estimate that an increased dismissal risk reduces the total days of parental childcare by around six percent. The identification relies on a reform that made it easier for employers in Sweden to dismiss workers in small firms. Both a sorting effect and a behavioral effect can explain the reduced childcare. I also find that temporary parental leave is redistributed within households if only one partner was affected by the reform. “Private Equity and Employees” Using linked employer-employee data from Sweden, a difference-in-difference approach, and 201 private equity buyouts undertaken between 1998 and 2004, we show that unemployment risk declines and labor income increases for employees after a private equity buyout. A plausible explanation is relaxed financial constraints: the effects are strongest in industries dependent on external finance for growth, for non-divisional buyouts, and for buyouts just prior to 2001. “Temporary Disability Insurance and Spousal Labor Supply” We use a reform in the Swedish temporary disability insurance to show that the partner’s benefit level affects spousal labour supply: an eleven percent increase of the partner’s benefit level is estimated to prolong spousal sick spells with around eight percent, which corresponds to an elasticity of sick days with respect to the partner’s benefit of three-quarters of the own labor supply elasticity of unity.
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| 45. |
- Oxenstierna, Gabriel C, 1955-
(author)
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Market power in the Swedish banking oligopoly : a game-theoretic model of competition applied to the five big Swedish banks 1989-97
- 1999
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This thesis aims at assessing the degree of competition among the five dominating Swedish banks during the period 1989-1997. In so doing, it also aims to develop a general oligopoly model with the specific purpose of providing a tool for an improved methodology for the evaluation of market power in oligopolistic markets, and to demonstrate the empirical application of this methodology.In the first of the three essays, An Asymmetric Oligopoly Model and a Method for Its Empirical Application, a general oligopoly model is developed that is suitable for empirical research where the data set contains firm-level data on prices, quantities and costs. This model makes it possible to gauge empirically observed prices to a range of game-theoretic equilibrium prices that are analytically deducted. It also allows for precise calculations of welfare effects from non-competitive pricing.In the second essay, Do Swedish Banks Enjoy Economies of Scale or Economies of Scope?, the extent of production economies on the cost side in the five big Swedish banks are investigated. This essay complements the empirical study of Swedish banking by, inter alia, estimating a cost function that includes not only operating costs, but also opportunity costs of equity capital. Results imply small dis-economies of scope between deposits and loans for the banks, as well as slightly negative economies of scale.In the third essay, Testing for Market Power in the Swedish Banking Oligopoly, the model in the first essay is developed into a banking context, allowing for the inherent multi-product characteristic in that industry. In the empirical part, results show that there was significant market power in both the loan market and the deposit market, although with a strongly time-varying pattern. The overall picture of conduct, is that pricing policies were less competitive in the deposit market. The economic cost level consitutes a bottom level for pricing in the loan market and attempts to establish higher spreads are not sustainable in the long run. Finally, welfare losses to the society from non-competitive pricing of loans and deposits are calculated to be ca 1.1% of GDP as a yearly average during the sampling period. The combined results of the empirical analyses in the second and third essays, indicate that there are no cost-side arguments for the many mergers and acquisitions that have taken place in the industry proper, and that small, specialised banking institutions might be competitively viable.
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| 46. |
- Pateli, Evangelia, 1983-
(author)
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Essays on International Trade : Theory and Evidence on the Determinants and Implications of Firms' Import Behaviour
- 2018
-
Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This thesis aspires to further contribute to our understanding of both the determinants as well as the implications of intermediate goods trade. Faced with intensifying global competition, firms are increasingly developing their production process and their sourcing strategies beyond national borders in order to take advantage of lower costs, superior quality and technological advances.In the first two chapters, I analyse firm-level import decisions in an environment allowing for unintentional exchanges of import-relevant information between firms. I build on the idea that any import-specific knowledge acquired by established importers, in a given region/industry, spills over to prospective importers lowering the costs associated with entry in international markets for intermediates. Chapter 1, using firm-level import data on the universe of Swedish firms, at the product level and by source market for the period 1998-2011, provides evidence for the existence of import spillovers and offers insights into the mechanisms through which they operate. Chapter 2, sets out a theoretical framework formalising import spillovers and their implications for the firm’s import behaviour and for consumer welfare.In the third and last chapter of this thesis, I turn to intermediate import dependence with an aim to explain the lack of sensitivity of trade flows to exchange rate movements. I propose a tractable framework and study how real devaluations affect firm-level export decisions and export performance, as well as aggregate exports and welfare in an environment where final goods production uses both domestic and imported intermediates.
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| 47. |
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| 48. |
- Pronin, Mathias, 1985-
(author)
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Essays in Macroeconomics and Political Economy
- 2019
-
Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The Response of the Riksbank to House Prices in SwedenIn the aftermath of the recent financial crisis, an environment of historically low interest rates and extensive household indebtedness in the OECD countries have triggered a vivid debate on whether central banks should react to house-price fluctuations in their pursuit of monetary policy. In Sweden, a period of low policy rates and house-price inflation was halted when the central bank increased the interest rates in 2010. This study investigates whether the Riksbank reacted to house prices in the period from 1993 to 2013. Using Bayesian methods and quarterly data, I estimate a DSGE model with patient and impatient households, where the central bank reacts to house-price inflation. The results suggest that the Riksbank did respond to house prices during the sample period. The findings are robust and plausible from an economic perspective. Wealth Distribution under Heterogeneous PreferencesThe standard macroeconomic framework of uninsurable idiosyncratic income risk fails to generate key features of the aggregate wealth distribution. Although the assumptions of heterogeneity of either impatience rate or risk aversion are common in the literature, they do not reflect the evidence and common belief that both parameters are dispersed across the population. I extend the standard framework by allowing for heterogeneity in both impatience and risk aversion. The results suggest that this richer framework outperforms previous work in terms of matching actual properties of the wealth distribution. In particular, the model presented generates a greater concentration of wealth at the top of the distribution and a greater mass of poor households than models with preference heterogeneity in only one dimension. Political Budget Cycles and Dependence on Foreign Aid This study poses the question of whether countries with a higher share of foreign aid per GDP exhibit larger political budget cycles. Using data on a large sample of countries, I find a significant negative effect of aid dependency on the budget surplus in election years. The effect is quantitatively important and implies that on average, a 1% increase in foreign aid per GDP is associated with a 0.2 percentage point larger deficit in election years. The results are robust to the model specification, inclusion of control variables, and other political budget cycles' determining factors described in the recent literature.
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| 49. |
- Rapanos, Theodoros, 1985-
(author)
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Essays on the Economics of Networks Under Incomplete Information
- 2016
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Social networks constitute a major channel for the diffusion of information and the formation of attitudes in a society. Introducing a dynamic model of social learning, the first part of this thesis studies the emergence of socially influential individuals and groups, and identifies the characteristics that make them influential. The second part uses a Bayesian network game to analyse the role of social interaction and conformism in the making of decisions whose returns or costs are ex ante uncertain.
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| 50. |
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