| 1. |
- Erlingsson, Gissur Ó, 1974-, et al.
(author)
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Does size matter? Evidence from municipal splits
- 2024
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In: Journal of regional science. - : WILEY. - 0022-4146 .- 1467-9787.
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- We contribute to the limited knowledge of the consequences of municipal splits by estimating how break-ups of seven Swedish municipalities affected per capita expenditures. To predict what would have happened had the break-ups not taken place, we apply the matrix completion method with nuclear norm minimization. We find that smaller municipalities not necessarily imply higher per capita expenditures. Instead, expenditures increase in some cases, are unaffected in others, and in others, decrease. The results point to the complex nature of territorial reforms and underscore the perils of policy recommendations that take uniform outcomes of either amalgamations or break-ups for granted.
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| 2. |
- Sosa Andrés, Maximiliano
(author)
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A Risky and Polarized World : Essays on Uncertainty, Ideology and Foreign Policy
- 2023
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Essay 1 - We examine whether risk aversion as well as higher order risk attitudes (HORAs) (prudence and temperance) have changed during COVID-19. We include prudence and temperance as higher order measures, as these two have been largely understudied under extreme events but are determinants of decisions related to the health and financial domains. Once we account for socio-demographic characteristics, we find an overall increase in risk aversion during COVID-19. We do not find changes in prudence and temperance using the risk apportionment methodology.Essay 2 –I develop a new index of legal uncertainty, by extracting the topics in all laws approved in a country and year to calculate the unforecastable component in legal content, for a panel of 42 countries. I present how the index is constructed, test its robustness and compare it with available measures of institutional quality. I then apply the index to provide evidence on the consequences of legal uncertainty for investment and employment. Results show that, in the event of an increase in legal uncertainty, firms react by slowing down investments and laying off workers.Essay 3 - We implement a regression-discontinuity design on US data to study how divided government affects the polarization of the legislature, inter-branch conflict, and policy implementation. We document that Republican legislators serving under a divided government have more conservative ideologies than those serving under a fully unified government. We find an opposite effect for Democrats. In terms of policy implementation, we find evidence of moderation: compared to unified Republican governments, divided ones with a democratic chamber implement more liberal policies. Correspondingly, when Democrats lose unified control, policies become more conservative.Essay 4 - We analyze the impact of ideological alignment in the left-right spectrum between countries on the human rights recommendations sent within the Universal Periodic Review (UPR). By combining UPR records with data on political institutions, we determine if shared ideology between two country governments affects human rights policy. By using text-mining techniques, we analyze the sentiment of messages, and provide robust evidence that ideologically aligned governments send more positive and praising messages compared to non-aligned ones.
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| 3. |
- Ottosson, Lillit, 1988-
(author)
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From Welfare to Work : Financial Incentives, Active Labor Market Policies, and Integration Programs
- 2022
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Essay I: I study the effects of increased social assistance (SA) generosity by exploiting exogenous variation induced by a ruling in the Swedish Supreme Administrative Court in 1993, mandating local governments to provide a minimum level of untied SA payments. The new rule forced some local governments to increase their SA generosity, while others were unaffected as they already complied with the stricter standards. I find that a 1 percent increase in SA generosity caused an increase in SA recipiency by 1.3 percent and a decrease in employment by 0.2 percent, among individuals with a high risk of receiving SA. For individuals who were already recipients of SA, the increase in SA payments was not offset by lower labor earnings, resulting in increased disposable income.
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| 4. |
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| 5. |
- Cipullo, Davide
(author)
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Political Careers, Government Stability, and Electoral Cycles
- 2021
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Essay 1: This essay investigates the impact of voter support on the representation of women in the political profession. The empirical analysis exploits two-stage elections in the United States and Italy to hold the selection of candidates constant. In two-stage elections, candidates are admitted to the second round of voting based on the outcome of the first round. I find that among candidates who marginally qualify for the final round, women are 20 percent less likely than men to be elected to the US House of Representatives and 40 percent less likely to be elected mayor in Italian municipalities. Using a difference-in-discontinuities design, I then show that the gender gap in the probability of being elected has long-lasting effects on career trajectories. Women are substantially less likely than men to win future elections and to climb the political hierarchy. My findings suggest that one of the reasons that few women reach the top in politics is that female candidates face hurdles at the beginning of their careers.Essay 2 (with Felipe Carozzi and Luca Repetto): This essay studies how political fragmentation affects government stability. Using a regression-discontinuity design, we show that each additional party with representation in the local parliament increases the probability that the incumbent government is unseated by 5 percentage points. The entry of an additional party affects stability by increasing both the probability of a single-party majority and the instability of governments when such a majority is not feasible. We interpret our results in light of a bargaining model of coalition formation featuring government instability. Essay 3 (with André Reslow): This essay introduces macroeconomic forecasters as political agents and suggests that they use their forecasts to influence voting outcomes. We develop a probabilistic voting model in which voters do not have complete information about future states of the economy and have to rely on macroeconomic forecasters. The model predicts that prior to a referendum, it is optimal for forecasters with an economic interest (stake) in the outcome and influence over the public to publish biased forecasts. We test our theory using high-frequency data at the forecaster level surrounding the Brexit referendum. The results show that forecasters with greater stakes and influence released much more pessimistic and incorrect estimates of GDP growth under the Leave outcome scenario than other forecasters.Essay 4 (with André Reslow): This paper documents the existence of Political Forecast Cycles. In a theoretical model of political selection, we show that governments release overly optimistic GDP growth forecasts ahead of elections to increase the reelection probability. The bias arises from lack of commitment if voters are rational and from manipulation of voters’ beliefs if they are naive and do not expect the incumbent to be biased. Using high-frequency forecaster-level data from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Sweden, we document that governments overestimate short-term GDP growth by 10 to 13 percent during campaign periods. Furthermore, we find that the bias is larger when the incumbent government is not term-limited or constrained by a parliament led by the opposition. Consistent with the model, we also find that the election timing and amount of available information determine the size of the bias at different forecast horizons.
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| 6. |
- Fredriksson, Peter, et al.
(author)
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Alleviating Global Poverty : A Note on the Experimental Approach
- 2021
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In: Poverty in Contemporary Economic Thought. - London : Routledge. - 9780367354268 - 9780429331312 ; , s. 188-198
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Book chapter (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This chapter describes the research by Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer, who pioneered the experimental approach to understanding poverty alleviation, for which they were awarded the 2019 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. Economic well-being doubled in the poorest countries between 1995 and 2018. Child mortality has been cut in half relative to 1995, and the proportion of children attending school has gone up from 56 to 80 percent. Any post-intervention differences in the outcome of interest can thus be solely attributed to the treatment. Studies using field experiments are therefore characterized by high internal validity. A key issue is whether experimental results can be generalized to other contexts, whether or not they are externally valid. In the mid-1990s, Michael Kremer and colleagues conducted the first field experiments within development economics in rural Western Kenya.
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| 7. |
- Jävervall, Sebastian, 1990-
(author)
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Corruption, Distortions and Development
- 2021
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Essay I: Does increased government transparency make bureaucracies more meritocratic? I study the impact of politician disclosure requirements on the assignment of bureaucrats to public posts. I collect detailed information on bureaucrats' qualifications and construct a novel measure of bureaucratic mismatch—an index measuring the extent to which a bureaucrat is under- or overqualified to perform a specific task. Using the staggered implementation of Indian state elections for identification, I find that information disclosure is associated with a mismatch reduction of 2.5% of a standard deviation. This effect is substantially larger (15–45% of a standard deviation) in posts that are more important for policy implementation and tasks that bureaucrats perceive to be more prestigious. In addition, I find that information disclosure increases returns to bureaucrat skill. Bureaucrats with greater skill are more likely to reach prestigious positions in more transparent states. Taken together, the results show that government transparency promotes meritocracy within public organizations.Essay II (with Roza Khoban): Political distortions are prevalent in many developing countries and can imply substantial productivity losses. Theory is ambiguous as to whether greater openness to trade amplifies or reduces the effects of such distortions. This paper shows that trade liberalization in India decreased the value of firms' political connections, suggesting a reduction in political distortions. First, using variation in firm connections stemming from political turnover, we identify that political connections increase firm performance by 10–20%. Second, we evaluate how the value of political connections changed after India's externally imposed tariff reductions, using a triple-difference and difference-in-discontinuities design. We find that political connections became substantially less valuable when tariffs on input goods were reduced. Our findings imply that access to international markets reduces firms' dependence on political connections to source input goods, thus reducing the distortionary effect of such connections. Our results suggest a new margin for gains from trade in the presence of political distortions through a direct effect of trade liberalization on the prevalence of such distortions.Essay III: Social unrest is a pervasive problem in the developing world. Yet, the causes of social unrest are not fully understood. This paper studies the impact of electing dominant party representatives on social unrest in South Africa. Since the end of apartheid, the African National Congress (ANC) party has held a hegemonic position in South African politics. At the same time, the party has been criticized for poor implementation of basic service delivery and accused of corruption and government malpractice. Combining geo-referenced data on riots and protests with a regression discontinuity design, I find that the prevalence of violent social unrest is substantially lower in ANC-controlled areas. The findings provide a nuanced perspective on the political determinants of social unrest in a dominant party setting.
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| 8. |
- Andersson, Tommy, et al.
(author)
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2020 års Ekonomipris till Paul Milgrom och Robert Wilson
- 2020
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In: Ekonomisk Debatt. - : Nationalekonomiska Föreningen. - 0345-2646. ; 48:8, s. 5-12
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Journal article (pop. science, debate, etc.)abstract
- Kungl. Vetenskapsakademien har beslutat dela ut årets Ekonomipris till Paul Milgrom och Robert Wilson, båda från Stanford University, USA, för ”förbättringar av auktionsteorin och uppfinningar av nya auktionsformat”. Årets pristagare har i sin forskning sammanfört teori och praktik, till nytta för enskilda individer, företag och samhällen världen över.
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| 9. |
- Klarin, Jonas
(author)
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Empirical Essays in Public and Political Economics
- 2020
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Essay I: This paper proposes a novel approach to the issue of size, cost-efficiency and economies of scale by focusing on the break-up of municipalities. Municipal break-ups are an understudied phenomenon that nevertheless has been recurrent not only in parts of eastern Europe, but also in Spain and Sweden. Analyzing seven voluntary break-ups of Swedish municipalities, we estimate the effects of municipal splits on municipal total costs as well as administrative costs. To predict what would have happened had the splits not taken place, we apply the matrix completion method with nuclear norm minimization. Our results do not support the standard view, i.e. that smaller municipalities imply higher per capita costs. Instead, we find that costs increase in some municipalities, are unaffected in others and decrease elsewhere. The findings point to the complex nature of territorial reforms, the difficulty in drawing general conclusions of such, and hence, the perils of expecting them to have uniform outcomes.
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| 10. |
- Mörk, Eva, 1971-, et al.
(author)
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Consequences of parental job loss on the family environment and on human capital formation : Evidence from workplace closures
- 2020
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In: Labour Economics. - : Elsevier BV. - 0927-5371 .- 1879-1034. ; 67
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- We study the consequences of mothers' and fathers' job loss for parents, families, and children. Rich Swedish administrative data allow us to identify workplace closures and account for non-random selection of displaced workers. Our main conclusion is that effects on children are limited, although parents and families are negatively affected in terms of parental health, labour market outcomes and separations. We find no effects of parental job loss on childhood health. While educational and early adult outcomes are unaffected by paternal job loss, we find small negative effects of maternal job loss, which contradicts some of the earlier evidence. Limited effects on family disposable income suggest that welfare institutions successfully insure families, in particular, those with low income, thus protecting the family environment. A dual earner norm and strong incentives for female labour supply may contribute to the absence of positive effects of maternal job loss.
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