A long-standing issue in political economics is whether party control makes a difference in determining fiscal and economics policies. This question is very difficult to answer empirically since parties are not randomly selected to govern political entities. This paper uses a...

This paper addresses the question of whether the size of the legislature matters for the size of government. Previous empirical studies have found a positive relationship between the number of legislators and the size of government but it is questionable whether they have identified a causal...

This paper studies how social pressure affects the behavior of soccer referees. We make use of an attractive source of exogenous variation in the number of spectators at matches. Due to recent hooligan violence, the Italian government has implemented a regulation that forces some soccer teams to...

The paper examines the accumulation of debt by Swedish local governments. I find that right-wing governments accumulate more debt when facing a higher probability of defeat, whereas the opposite occurs for left-wing governments. These effects are sizable: a right-wing government increases its...

In this comment, I revisit a question raised in Karadja and Prawitz (2019) concerning a causal relationship between mass emigration and long-run political outcomes. I find that their results are not robust to (i) selection of the appropriate control variables, (ii) using valid cluster-robust...

This paper analyses if privatisation of vocational rehabilitation can improve labour market opportunities for individuals on long-term sickness absence. We use a field experiment performed by the Public Employment Service and the Social Insurance Agency in Sweden during 2008–2010, in which...

The distribution of parental leave uptake and childcare activities continues to conform to traditional gender roles. In 2002, with the goal of increasing gender equality, Sweden added a second "daddy month," i.e., an additional month of pay-related parental leave reserved exclusively for each...

Moral hazard is easy to justify theoretically but difficult to detect empirically. Individuals may report sick due to illness as well as for moral hazard reasons. Potential abuse of the sickness insurance system in Sweden is estimated by comparing the change between the number of men and women...

Empirical foundations for the view that high inflation impairs GDP growth are examined using annual data for 115 countries over the period 1960-1995. Taking into account country heterogeneity and time-specific symmetric shocks, as well as endogeneity of inflation and dynamics of GDP growth,...

We study the effects of surname change to Swedish-sounding or neutral names on earnings for immigrants from Asian/African/Slavic countries. To estimate this effect, we exploit the variation resulting from different timing of name changes across individuals during the 1990s. The results imply...