Working Papers

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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.…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…