Articles in English

We examine immigrant self-employment in Sweden during 2011–2021 – a turbulent decade with a large influx of refugees into the country and the outbreak of the global COVID-19 pandemic. Four outcome var…

Terrorism causes anger and fear among citizens, but also often leads to counterterrorist legislation (CTL). We explore determinants of CTL and whether it affects the likelihood of terrorism and limits…

How does government ideology affect the size of government? This article employs data on government spending and regulation using a new disaggregation scheme and new causal strategy. It finds that gov…

Fifteen years ago, Bergh and Erlingsson (2009) argued that Sweden's period from 1980 to 2000 was characterised by “liberalisation without retrenchment”. This resulted from pragmatic policymaking, a co…

Since comprehensive data became available five years ago, a literature about academic freedom has emerged. This paper surveys studies on the causes and consequences of academic freedom. The new litera…

Ample evidence demonstrates that early-life adversity negatively affects morbidity and survival in late life. We show that disease exposure in infancy also has a continuous impact on reproduction and…

Little is known about how democratic process affects terrorism. We outline three mechanisms and test their implications in a large panel dataset of 76 countries. Voter turnout is associated with fewer…

We estimate the causal effects of parental incarceration on children’s short- and long-run outcomes using administrative data from Sweden. Our empirical strategy exploits exogenous variation in parent…

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…

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…

Over the past 30 years, the use of municipally owned corporations (MOCs) has increased rapidly in Sweden. Proponents of MOCs claim that they promote efficiency. However, at the same time, critics stre…

Commenters regularly claim that parliament leaders in Latin America and the Caribbean favor their birth regions. Using granular data on nightlight intensity from up to 183,000 micro regions across 25…

A majority of the world’s countries ban forms of blasphemous expressions, often arguing that such legislation is necessary to prevent conflicts and terrorism. We explore the association between types…

Not only do corporations discriminate, but states do as well. We relate measures of government discrimination against various groups to measures of institutions and culture. We find that states behave…

Using the random assignment of university engineering students to peer groups during introductory freshmen weeks, this paper studies how a student's parental income and facial attractiveness affect th…

Research indicates that education quality – measured by test scores in international student surveys – predicts economic growth. In this paper, we extend previous findings up to 2016 and analyse test…

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…

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…

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…

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…