We report agent-based simulations of religiosity dynamics in a spatially dispersed population. Agents' religiosity responds to neighbors via pairwise interactions as well as via club goods effects. A simulation run is deemed fundamentalist if the final distribution contains a sizable minority of...

This paper explores how different levels of knowledge correlate with desirable preventive and curative practices against malaria in Honduras. The paper additionally analyzes 'information externalities' associated with non-specific malaria health services, communicational campaigns and organized...

Sweden has undertaken major national reforms of its school sector which, consequently, has been classified as one of the most decentralized ones in the OECD. This paper investigates whether school resources became more unequally distributed across municipalities in connection with the reforms...

This paper investigates to what extent voters and politicians have the same preferences for locally provided welfare services. We make use of two different types of survey questionnaires; one directed towards voters and one directed towards politicians. We reach two main conclusions in the...

In this paper we investigate the demand for local public school expenditures in Sweden. By using survey data, a method previously never applied to Swedish data, the paper provides an additional piece of evidence on individual demand for publicly provided local services. Estimating a linear...

Following ECB-president Draghi's remark that the European Social Model does no longer exist and the crisis can only be overcome through a combination of austerity and structural reform, this paper examines the consequences of austerity measures and structural reforms adopted during the crisis in...

This paper studies effects of the introduction of a new digital mass medium on reemployment of unemployed job seekers. We combine data on high-speed (broadband) internet availability at the local level with German individual register data. We address endogeneity by exploiting technological...

The Swedish employment rate is high in an international comparison and has been rising during recent decades. This pattern is especially pronounced among the elderly and women and reflects labour supply behaviour in these groups. The policy survey in this report suggests that the main drivers of...

A perennial debate worldwide over housing aid policy focuses on whether the government should provide housing vouchers or subsidized public housing units. To complement the empirically- dominated literature, this paper builds a general equilibrium model that merges urban land use (monocentric...

The debate about how to reconcile political with economic democracy is translated in the framework of wage- and profit-led growth in this paper. The inherent tension between providing sufficient profit incentive to motivate investment by the capitalist class and maintaining electoral...