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Truth commissions (TCs) are increasingly lauded by policymakers as a key part of the process of addressing systematic abuses and violence in the past, whether civil war, apartheid, colonialism, or abuse against minorities (Dancy and Thoms 2021; Skaar 2018). Yet, systematic evidence on the effects of implementing truth seeking mechanisms remains limited (Hirsch, MacKenzie, and Sesay 2012). Despite a growing literature that examines determinants of support for different transitional justice measures, our knowledge about consequences of transitional justice at the individual level remains limited. To address this gap and to assess some of the common assumptions about the effects of TCs, we investigate whether the public release of the Norwegian TRC’s report on historical injustices in the government’s treatment of the Sámi and other national minorities in Norway had any immediate causal effects on the views of importance of understanding the past, prejudice, and support for government policies for minority rights.

Who reacts politically to fiscally costly immigration? A political economy tradition holds that reactions depend on economic self-interest, whereas a social psychology tradition emphasizes generalized political orientations and trust. Past work largely leans in favor of the latter tradition. We make three contributions. First, our dependent variable is a concrete perception of welfare state sustainability, arguably better suited to capture self-interest. Second, both the political economy- and social psychology traditions have been studied narrowly; we separate between multiple interests (including economic local context), and compare several types of trust orientations. Third, we use machine learning methods well-suited to analyze treatment heterogeneity in a randomized survey experiment. We find support for both interest-based and social psychological explanations. As for the latter, what matters is not only, or even mainly, orientations/trust related to immigration. Rather, generalized political distrust strongly regulates when costly immigration cues trigger welfare sustainability worries.

With accelerating climate change, political conflicts over the appropriate policy responses have intensified. Studies of public opinion have identified a range of individual level variables that are correlated with views on climate change (see e.g. Hornsey et al. 2016 for a meta analysis). In rich countries, many studies find a gender gap in such views, where men express less concern than women (see e.g. Bush and Clayton 2022). This seems to hold in Norway too (Krange et al. 2018). Our project attempts to address several shortcomings in the literature on the gender gap in environmental attitudes. First, while there is a rich literature on concerns and awareness of climate change (see e.g. Egan and Mullin 2017, Fairbrother 2022), we know little about support for specific policies and whether the gender gap translates from concerns to policy preferences. Second, and related to the first point, we do not know what causes the gender gap, which is presumably key for whether there is a gender gap also in policy preferences. For instance, if it represents fundamental differences in concern and risk assessments (as argued by Kahan et al. 2007), it will likely spillover from concern to all types of preferences, while if it represents self-interest, such as being driven by more men working in extractive industries, it will presumably vary across policies and across men. Finally, we do not know much about how voters trade off different aspects of climate change policies, such as the use of market mechanisms, distributional concerns, costs burdens, and impacts on other parts of the environment (e.g. wind farms harming wildlife) when forming their climate change policy preferences. This is key to understand which policies are more or less likely to be implemented.

Ideological Biases in Research Evaluations? The Case of Research on Majority-Minority Relations

We conduct a vignette survey experiment to detect bias against ethnic minority candidates among Norwegian politicians. In addition, we conduct a list experiment among Norwegian voters to examine bias against voting for a party list with ethnic minority candidates.

We study how voters respond to randomized policy platforms that represent two potential directions that Social Democratic Parties might move.

A growing body of research suggests that refugees’ initial settlement area can have a long-run impact on subsequent integration outcomes. As a result, matching refugees and asylum seekers to initial locations where they are likely to succeed holds the potential to improve their labor market integration. In this report we focus on the GeoMatch algorithm, which is a recommendation tool that provides settlement officers with data-driven location recommendations for incoming refugees and asylum seekers. Leveraging machine learning on historical data, the tool predicts labor market outcomes for individuals across possible settlement areas. A flexible allocation algorithm then provides location recommendations for each family unit while taking capacity constraints into account. Drawing on administrative data from Statistics Norway and incorporating a set of realistic constraints, we find that using GeoMatch recommendations could improve refugees’ monthly earnings by up to 55% over baseline. The report ends with a discussion of how the tool can be implemented in the Norwegian context. The Feasibility of Using Data-Driven Algorithmic Recommendations for Refugee Placement in Norway publishedVersion

To attract voters, politicians might appeal to their interests and attitudes through policies. They may also appeal to their identities by supplying candidates that belong to their social group or by providing messages that symbolically appeal to the group. While there is an advanced literature on the role of policy appeals, much less is known about the effects of social and particularly symbolic appeals. Moreover, since politicians can jointly make several appeals, it is important to examine how voters weigh appeals against each other. In this project we conduct a conjoint experiment in Norway where we estimate the effects of all three types of appeals, with a specific emphasis on symbolic appeals to social class.

Denne rapporten gir en oversikt over enkelt tilgjengelig informasjon som bosettere har etterspurt i intervjuer med oss. Vi tror at denne oversikten vil gjøre det enklere for bosettere å finne relevant kommuneinformasjon. Oversikten vi har gitt er imidlertid «ubearbeidet data» og gjør at bosettere fortsatt må bruke noe tid på å finne den informasjonen de trenger. I tilfeller hvor de først har snevret inn aktuelle kommuner så vil oversiktene likevel lette arbeidet og bidra til at man unngår å plassere flyktninger i kommuner som mangler relevant tilbud.

We report results from a large-scale, pre-registered randomized field experiment in 159 Norwegian schools over four years. The intervention includes students aged 7-9 and consists of pulling students from their regular mathematics classes into small, homogenous groups for mathematics instruction for 3 to 4 hours per week, for two periods of 4-6 weeks per school year. All students, not only struggling students, are pulled out. We find that students in treatment schools increased their performance in mathematics by .16 standard deviations at the end of the school year and by .06 standard deviations in national tests 1-2 years later, with no differential effect by pre-ability level or gender. Our study is particularly relevant for policy-makers seeking to use additional teaching resources to target a heterogeneous student population efficiently.

Have recent trends in globalization changed the positive link between trade openness and social insurance? The consensus view - that voters want better social insurance against income loss the more open the economy - is seemingly contested by the rise of populism and the China shock. We present a theoretical framework of risk and income effects of globalization that captures the conventional view, but also shows when it will be modified: When the income effect is negative, the political support for social insurance can decline in spite of the risk effect. We construct an empirical measure of welfare state support across European regions and leverage the rapid integration of China into the world economy to show that higher import competition reduces the support for social insurance. Consistent with our framework, we decompose the overall effect of the shock into a (weak) positive risk effect and a (strong) negative income effect.

Coordination in collective wage setting can constrain potential monopoly gains to unions in non-traded-goods industries. Countries with national wage coordination can thus stabilize overall employment against fluctuations and shocks in the world economy. We test this theory by exploring within-country variation in exposure to competition from China in 13 European countries. Our causal estimates demonstrate that in countries with uncoordinated wage setting, regions with higher import exposure from China experienced a marked fall in employment, while countries with wage-coordination experienced no such employment effects. We test our main mechanism against other explanations, and show that our findings are robust to alternative measures of wage coordination, industry classifications, and trade exposure.