Articles in English

The association between social trust and economic growth is well-documented but how it works remains an open theoretical and empirical question. The paper uses growth accounting to break down sources…

Some of the most contested questions in political science and political economy revolve around the conditions under which democratization is likely to happen and when democracy becomes a stable instit…

We revisit a Swedish comprehensive school reform first evaluated by Meghir and Palme (2005). This reform increased years of schooling and abolished tracking. We extend the original analysis to the ful…

Consequences of social trust are comparatively well studied, while its societal determinants are often subject to debate. This paper studies both in the context of Catalan attempts to secede from Spai…

Previous research has indicated that constitutionalized emergency provisions effectively constrain the behaviour of democratic governments subsequent to terrorist attacks. In this article, we ask if t…

In the aftermath of the Second World War, Sweden dismantled an education system that was strongly influenced by German, Neo-Humanist pedagogical principles in favor of a progressive, student-centered…

The issue of what explains differences in the wealth of nations is one of the most classic in economics. We propose de facto academic freedom as an explanatory variable. The main idea is that such fre…

This paper reports results from a classroom dictator game comparing the effects of three different sets of standard instructions. As was shown by Oxobyand Spraggon (2008), inducing a feeling of entitl…

It is often assumed that there is a trade-off between civil rights and national safety although the association is theoretically ambiguous. This article therefore explores this association by estimati…

There is scant systematic empirical evidence on what explains variation in academic freedom. Making use of a new indicator and panel data covering 64 countries 1960–2017, we investigate how de facto a…

Nine out of 10 constitutions contain explicit emergency provisions, intended to help governments cope with extraordinary events that endanger many people or the existence of the state. We ask two ques…

While there is almost unanimous consent among scientists that climate change is real and has detrimental consequences, there is a sizable number of people who are skeptical towards these propositions…

Previous studies have stressed the role of a child's family environment for future political participation. This field of research has, however, overlooked that children within the same family have di…

This paper studies the effect of the 1918–19 influenza pandemic on fertility using a historical dataset from Sweden. Our results suggest an immediate reduction in fertility driven by morbidity, and ad…

We investigate two parallel school reforms in Sweden to assess the long-run health effects of education. One reform only increased years of schooling, while the other increased years of schooling but…

Recent micro-level studies have suggested that globalization—in particular, economic globalization and trade with China—breeds political polarization and populism. This study examines whether or not t…

What is the effect of coups d’état on repression? Do ‘bad’ coups against democracies decrease respect for physical integrity rights? Does it make a difference whether a coup d’état is staged by the mi…

This paper asks whether the sensitivity of market long-term interest rates and credit ratings is associated with cross-country differences in informal institutions, measured by social trust. We note a…

Populism is a foreseeable reaction against the limited moral conception of society offered by both traditional left and right parties. Traditional parties have effectively rendered many voters homeles…

Media freedom is often curtailed in the wake of terrorist attacks. In this contribution, we ask whether constitutional provisions that are intended—directly or indirectly—to protect media freedom afec…

This article presents a methodology for empirically identifying the key player, whose removal from the network leads to the optimal change in aggregate activity level in equilibrium [Ballester, C., Ca…

This note describes how research on the link between economic openness and government size has changed over time. Early interpretations suggested that countries develop welfare states to compensate fo…

Recent work in Cohn et al. (2019) shows that civic honesty and cooperative behaviour captured in a wallet-return experiment varies considerably across the world. Similarly, beliefs about social trust…

Coups and regime transitions are events that typically are intended to change the basic institutional framework of a country. Which specific institutions change and the consequences of these changes n…

Intervening on modifiable risk factors to prevent dementia is of key importance, since progress-modifying treatments are not currently available. Education is inversely associated with dementia risk,…

While the association between economic freedom and long‐term economic growth has been well documented, the parallel research literature on the distributional consequences of economic freedom is full o…

For the past decade, the sharing economy has not only grown but also expanded to cover a wide variety of different activities across the globe. Despite a lot of research, there is still no agreement o…

We examine how variation in antisemitism across countries can be explained by economic freedom. We propose two mechanisms. First, the more economic freedom, the greater the scope of market activities.…

Religion exerts a powerful influence on many people’s lives. We investigate how self-assessed religiosity affects self-assessed health in Europe. Our sample consists of individuals with a native fathe…

We measure and analyze discriminatory behavior against same-sex couples trying to rent an apartment in Portugal and pay special attention to the role of religiosity. This is the first correspondence f…