While it might appear self-evident that the trend toward the New Public Management (NPM) in the public administration systems of many Western countries is an outgrowth of neoliberalism, the case of Swedish education suggests that policies can have widely different and counterintuitive sources....

Using World Bank data on institutional quality and the KOF Globalization Index, we examine over 100 countries from 1992 to 2010 to analyze the relationship between economic and social globalization and six measures of institutional quality. Theoretically, the incentives of elites to respond to...

New Public Management (NPM) reforms have emerged in the public administration systems of many Western countries in recent decades. The dominant view in international research on NPM is that these reforms are the product of neo-liberal ideas. In this article, I set out to nuance this view by...

We present a field experiment conducted in order to explore the existence of ethnic discrimination in contact with public authorities. Two fictitious parents, one with a Swedish-sounding name and one with an Arabic-sounding name, sent email inquiries to all Swedish municipalities asking for...

Using World Bank data on institutional quality and the KOF Globalization Index, we examine over 100 countries from 1992 to 2010 to analyze the relationship between economic and social globalization and six measures of institutional quality. Theoretically, the incentives of elites to respond to...

We study a reform by which a standardized model of choice and competition was introduced in tax-financed home care in a majority of Swedish municipalities. The market for home care is of particular interest since it is close to the ideal quasi-market. For identification, we exploit the different...

The Swedish school system suffers from profound problems with teacher recruitment and retention, knowledge decline, and grade inflation. Absenteeism is high, and psychiatric disorders have risen sharply among Swedish pupils in the last ten years. In this pioneering analysis of the consequences...

We study the political effects of mass emigration to the United States in the 19th century using data from Sweden. To instrument for total emigration over several decades, we exploit severe local frost shocks that sparked an initial wave of emigration, interacted with within-country travel...

Can competition and the existence of profit-seeking actors in the school market improve educational quality? To see cost-efficient, long-term improvements, we identify the school system's capacity for knowledge-enhancing innovation as crucial and explore this question by examining Swedish...

Many countries have implemented quasi-markets to enhance entrepreneurship and innovation in welfare service provision. However, the benefits have generally been limited; this can also be observed in Sweden, a country which stands out for its extensive use of quasi-markets. Based on the Swedish...