Articles in English

All organizations need to allocate labor to production and administration. In many cases – particularly within the public sector – the optimal allocation is far from obvious. Indeed, vocal concerns ha…

We study the causal effects of previous experience and language skills when newly arrived refugees in Sweden apply for job openings by means of a field experiment. Applications were sent from randomly…

Politicians and international organisations advocate for increased regulation and government control of industry in order to handle climate change and reduce overall greenhouse gas emissions. However,…

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…

We identify dementia risk factors using demographic data for Swedish cohorts 1932–1950. Factors are advanced maternal age, sibling spacing, and twin births. These factors increase dementia risk, espec…

This paper examines the relationship between environmental accidents and voting. Following the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, environmentalist parties entered parliaments in several nations. This paper u…

Some worry that openness undermines important cultural values. We study whether globalization has reduced social trust in Europe and find, using a sample of immigrants to rule out reverse causality, t…

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…

We study the impact of refugee inflows on voter turnout in Sweden in a period when shifting immigration patterns made the previously homogeneous country increasingly heterogeneous. Analyzing individua…

We study the relationship between adult education and training (AET) and employment in Sweden. Exploiting rich data from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, and using…

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, t…

Does quality information affect international trade? We show theoretically how firms, in the absence of trustworthy information, may restrict their export activity. Exploring bilateral export flows ac…

Populists argue for redistribution from an elite to "ordinary people". The present paper asks if populist administrations actually achieve redistribution. Combining new data on populism in Latin Ameri…

Despite the relatively uncontested importance of promoting school attendance in the policy arena, little evidence exists on the causal effect of school absence on long-run outcomes. We address this qu…

A set of legal rules in liberal democracies guarantee freedom for individuals to shape their own lives. This study investigates whether such rules suffice to make people satisfied with the freedom the…

Nine out of ten modern constitutions contain explicit emergency provisions, describing who can call a state of emergency (and under which conditions) and the additional powers government enjoys under…

We estimate impacts of exposure to an infant health intervention trialled in Sweden in the early 1930s using purposively digitised birth registers linked to school catalogues, census files and tax rec…

It is unclear whether democracies or autocracies are more likely to silence or control the media when facing attempt at overthrowing the government. Our estimate of the dynamics of press freedom sugge…

A vast economic literature examines the welfare gains and distributional consequences of economic reforms, while much less is generally known on the relationship of inequality and forced regime change…

This paper addresses the competing views by studying Sweden, a country with a dramatic growth in the number of MOCs since the 1970s. We examine the association between the number of MOCs, citizen sati…

Economic theory predicts that outsourcing public services to private firms reduces costs, but the effect on quality is ambiguous. We explore quality differences between publicly and privately owned am…

We estimate a substantial female grade gain when being graded anonymously compared to male students in 101-macroeconomics courses. Females graded anonymously are more likely to continue with economics…

The COVID-19 pandemic has not only caused millions to die and even more to lose their jobs, it has also prompted more governments to simultaneously declare a state of emergency than ever before enabli…

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…