Search

Focuses on the political parties and paper money inflation in Sweden during the 18th century. Accountability of the trading partners; Existence of political regime between the Hats and the Caps parties; Combination on the economic facts of inflation and political factors.

In a representative democracy, politicians should either implement policies that voters want or policies that politicians believe are in voters long-term interest, even if voters currently oppose them. The exact balance between these goals is debatable and politicians' policy engagement can tempt them to dismiss voters' preferences and resist information counter to their own policy position. In this paper, we discuss Sweden's generous migration policy and how it can serve as an example where politicians' policy engagement led them to a overly optimistic view of the implications of welcoming a large influx of refugees. Using detailed, repeated, survey data on members of parliament, we show that Swedish politicians favored a much more generous policy toward accepting refugees than voters for a long period of time. Neither observable factors nor expert knowledge can explain this difference between voters and politicians. A more likely explanations is wishful thinking and policy engagement from politicians that continued until political competition increased. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the labor market effects of non‐pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to combat the COVID‐19 pandemic. We focus on the Nordic countries which showed one of the highest variations in NPIs despite having similar community spread of COVID‐19 at the onset of the pandemic: While Denmark, Finland and Norway imposed strict measures ('lockdowns'), Sweden decided for much lighter restrictions. Empirically, we use novel administrative data on weekly new unemployment and furlough spells from all 56 regions of the Nordic countries to compare the labor market outcomes of Sweden with the ones of its neighbors. Our evidence suggests that the labor markets of all countries were severely hit by the pandemic, although Sweden performed slightly better than its neighbors. Specifically, we find the worsening of the Swedish labor market to occur around 2 to 3 weeks later than in the other Nordic countries, and that its cumulative sum of new unemployment and furlough spells remained significantly lower (about 20–25%) during the time period of our study (up to week 21 of 2020). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sport-related violence is widespread. Yet, there is a poor understanding of what factors trigger hooligans to become unruly. In this paper I test the so called frustration-aggression hypothesis, which holds that thwarted expectations from a reference point tend to lead to violent behavior. I use unique data on hooligan violence in Sweden. I find that frustration, generated by a team's bad performance, indeed leads to unruly supporter behavior. A one-position drop in the soccer league leads to approximately 5 percent more unruly behavior by the team's supporters. The analysis helps policy makers in their endeavors to reduce group-related violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]