Working Papers
Working Paper No. 1487
Self-Employment among In-Movers and Stayers in Rural Areas: Insights from Swedish Register and Survey Data
Our use of longitudinal register data combined with a unique survey allows us to offer a more comprehensive picture of rural self-employment than in previous studies. We find that self-employed in rur…
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Working Paper No. 1486
Economic Freedom and Academic Freedom across Nations
Academic freedom is a cornerstone of modern academic life. It is not only implied by basic liberal principles but also contributes to scientific progress and economic growth. It is therefore important…
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Working Paper No. 1485
Labor Market Effects of a Youth Summer Employment Program in Sweden
We evaluate a non-targeted summer youth employment program (SYEP) for high school students aged 16–19 in Stockholm, Sweden, where public sector job offers were as good as randomly assigned. In contras…
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Working Paper No. 1484
Moonshots and the New Industrial Policy: Questioning the Mission Economy
The notion that society should be organized around large so-called missions has gained momentum in public debate, and the reemergence of active industrial policy across the world has been inspired by…
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Working Paper No. 1476
Free to Improve? The Impact of Free School Attendance in England
We investigate the impact of attending a free school in England – that is, a new start-up school that enjoys considerable autonomy while remaining in the state sector. We analyse the effects of two se…
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Working Paper No. 1473
Freedom of Expression and Social Conflict
The association between freedom of expression – freedom of speech and the freedom of the media – and social conflict is theoretically ambiguous and politically highly contested. On one side of the deb…
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Working Paper No. 1472
Independent-School Competition and Sweden's Performance in TIMSS
This paper analyses the effects of independent-school competition on Sweden’s performance in TIMSS, an international low-stakes test in mathematics and science among students in year 8. Exploiting var…
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Working Paper No. 1471
Does Capitalism Disfavor Women? Evidence from Life Satisfaction
There is widespread concern, especially in certain feminist circles, that a market-oriented economic system, or capitalism, disfavors women. This could take many forms, such as lower wages for the sam…
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Working Paper No. 1455
Nonresponse Bias in Trust Surveys
Social trust is typically measured using surveys that ask people if they agree that most people can be trusted. A potential problem is that falling response rates plague these surveys. If non-response…
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Working Paper No. 1449
Coups and Economic Crises
This paper explores whether coups cause increased crisis risk, and if some types of coups are associated with stronger risk. I use a worldwide sample with data on more than 1200 onsets of economic cri…
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Working Paper No. 1448
Aid and Child Health: Local Effects of Aid on Stunting in Malawi
Motivated by a recent setback in the fight against child malnutrition, this study explores whether aid projects help to reduce stunting, or impaired growth, among children in the local area. Focusing…
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Working Paper No. 1447
Immigrants’ Tolerance and Integration into Society
We highlight a new factor behind integration: tolerance in the immigrants’ background culture. We hypothesize that it is easier to partake of economic, civic-political, and social life in a new countr…
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Working Paper No. 1438
The Economics behind the Directive on Adequate Minimum Wages in the EU: A Critical Assessment
The European Commission’s Directive on minimum wages aims to ensure an adequate minimum wage for all workers in the Union and thereby counteract poverty among the low paid. This article examines the u…
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Working Paper No. 1436
Does Legal Freedom Satisfy?
Much political conflict in the world revolves around the issue of how much freedom to accord people. Liberal democracies are characterized by, e.g., the rule of law and a strong protection of civil ri…
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Working Paper No. 1423
Ideological Spillovers Across the Atlantic? Evidence from Trump’s Presidential Election
Ideological spillovers refer to the modification of an individual’s core beliefs after learning about other people's beliefs. We study one specific international ideological spillover, namely, the ef…
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Working Paper No. 1416
Intolerance Predicts Climate Skepticism
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…
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Working Paper No. 1415
Kill Your Darlings? Do New Aid Flows Help Achieve a Poverty Minimizing Allocation of Aid?
In this study, we derive a poverty-minimizing allocation rule, based on which we assess the poverty-efficiency of actual aid allocations, with a special focus on the comparative impact of new donors a…
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Working Paper No. 1407
The Causal Effect of Transport Infrastructure: Evidence from a New Historical Database
In this paper, we analyze the effect of transport infrastructure investments in railways. As a testing ground, we use data from a new historical database that includes annual panel data on approximate…
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Working Paper No. 1405
Academic Freedom, Institutions and Productivity
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…
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Working Paper No. 1391
Aid and Institutions: Local Effects of World Bank Aid on Perceived Institutional Quality in Africa
Motivated by the lack of sub-national empirical evidence on the relationship between aid and institutional development, this study explores the local effects of World Bank aid on perceived institution…
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Working Paper No. 1388
Political Institutions and Academic Freedom: Evidence from Across the World
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…
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Working Paper No. 1380
The Sharing Economy: Definition, Measurement and its Relationship to Capitalism
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…
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Working Paper No. 1357
Economic Freedom and Antisemitism
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.…
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Working Paper No. 1353
What Happens when Municipalities Run Corporations? Empirical Evidence from 290 Swedish Municipalities
Across the globe, local governments have increasingly begun to rely on municipally owned corporations (MOCs) to provide public services, mounting to what scholars describe as a burgeoning corporatizat…
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Working Paper No. 1323
Does Local Government Corruption Inhibit Entrepreneurship?
The dominant ‘sand in the wheels’-view holds that entrepreneurship is strongly inhibited by corruption. Challenging this, the ‘grease the wheels’-view maintains that corruption might increase entrepre…
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Working Paper No. 1318
‘Two Gentlemen Sharing’: Rental Discrimination of Same-Sex Couples in Portugal
We measure and analyze discriminatory behavior against same-sex couples trying to rent an apartment in Portugal. This is the first correspondence field experiment investigating discrimination against…
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Working Paper No. 1311
Corruption, Judicial Accountability and Inequality: Unfair Procedures May Benefit the Worst-Off
We ask whether, as many seem to think, corruption worsens, and judicial accountability improves, inequality, and investigate this empirically using data from 145 countries 1960–2014. We relate perceiv…
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Working Paper No. 1269
Securing Personal Freedom through Institutions – the Role of Electoral Democracy and Judicial Independence
Personal freedom is highly valued by many and a central element of liberal political philosophy. Although personal freedom is frequently associated with electoral democracy, developments in countries…
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