Doctoral Theses / Doktorsavhandlingar Institutionen för nationalekonomi med statistik

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://gupea-staging.ub.gu.se/handle/2077/819

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The Economic Impacts of Carbon Taxation and Climate Change
(2025-09-02) Karlsson, Jimmy
Climate change constitutes one of the biggest societal challenges today, and carbon taxation is one of the most important policies to curb carbon emissions. This dissertation investigates the economic impacts of carbon taxation, and the economic damages caused by extreme weather. Analyzing a reform in Sweden, the research shows that carbon taxation can be an effective tool to reduce emissions in the manufacturing sector. It also shows that it can have negative effects on firm performance, by decreasing revenue and employment. The larger negative effect on firms’ demand for workers without a high-school degree suggests that carbon taxation increases labor market inequality. However, complementary analyses show no signs of increasing unemployment rates in local labor markets that are more exposed to the reform. Labor markets therefore seem able to mitigate the negative effects on labor demand induced by carbon taxation. These results contribute to the understanding of the distributional costs of the green transition.
Essays on the Economics of Crime, Corruption, and Institutions
(2025-08-21) Limjaroenrat, Vorada
The integrity of criminal justice institutions is essential to a country’s rule of law and economic development. This dissertation investigates how government actions and rules affect the behavior of key actors within the criminal justice system. It consists of three self-contained chapters, each based on newly collected administrative data from Thailand. The first two chapters focus on judges and their decisions. The first investigates how political pressure can affect court rulings and sentencing outcomes. The second explores why men and women sometimes receive different sentences for similar crimes. The third chapter shifts focus to the police force, examining how changes aimed at reducing corruption affect career advancement within the organization. Together, these studies reveal how rules, politics, and organizational structure interact within the criminal justice system—insights that are vital for developing policies to promote accountability and strengthen institutional performance.
Relative Comparisons in Organizations and Society
(2025-06-10) Reichert, Patrik
“Contests for Perception” We observe competitive behavior in different domains of society, even without explicit monetary prizes. In this paper, I model a mechanism that may drive such behavior: I study a contest model where prizes are given by an inactive observer’s posterior belief about a player’s ability. In other words, prizes are determined endogenously in the model. I define the equilibrium in this game and show how expected effort changes with two exogenous parameters: the probability of an agent being high ability and the difference in productive ability between types. I show that expected effort is maximized when uncertainty about players’ abilities is the highest. I identify a novel encouragement effect of ability asymmetry. Total expected effort can increase in ability asymmetry: when the prizes are determined in equilibrium, the discouragement effect from ability heterogeneity can be reversed when heterogeneity is sufficiently low. I also analyze win probabilities when allowing for the observer’s prior to depend on players’ identities: I identify the “underdog effect” where initially decreasing the prior belief about the ability of the player with lower expected ability can nonetheless increase her win probability. Keywords: Contests, Social Image, Status JEL Classification: D01, D91, M50 “Meritocracy in Hierarchical Organizations” Competitive promotions are perceived as meritocratic because they typically select talented players with a high probability. We show that in hierarchical organizations with more than two layers, this may not be true; competition backfires by inducing middle managers to block the promotion of talented subordinates to protect their own career prospects. Uncompetitive promotions mitigate this but may introduce a new trade-off: while maximizing middle-manager ability, they need not maximize top-tier ability. Whether this trade-off occurs depends non-trivially on bottom-tier ability and how noisily middle managers infer subordinates’ abilities. We discuss implications for wage inequality, effort incentives, and up-or-out rules. Keywords: Moral Hazard, Talent Identification, Promotions, Hierarchies, Meritocracy, Contests JEL Classification: D82, J01, M51 “Discouraged by Competition?!” We run a large online experiment where workers compete for monetary prizes based on their performance rank in a real-effort task. We test whether increasing competition through (1) greater prize inequality or (2) larger contest scale affects effort provision. Contrary to the theoretical predictions in Fang, Noe, and Strack (2020), we find that increased competition does not discourage effort. Concentrating the fixed monetary sum into fewer, higher-value prizes both boosts effort provision by over 27% and leads to more dispersed behavior among participants. Increasing contest scale by combining several smaller competitions into a larger one also appears to raise effort provision, although the differences are not statistically significant at conventional levels. We account for our findings with a novel theoretical model that incorporates stimulus-based attention into all-pay contests. Keywords: Contests, Inequality, Attention, Focusing, Salience JEL Classification: M52, J31, D31, D44, D63
Opposition to Carbon Pricing: Beliefs, Revenues, and Protesters
(2025-05-16) Ewald, Jens
Economists widely support carbon pricing—through taxes or emission permits—as an effective, cost-efficient strategy to fight climate change. Yet these policies often encounter strong political opposition. This dissertation examines the reasons behind this public resistance, focusing specifically on how people's beliefs, exposure to energy price increases, and choices regarding revenue allocation influence attitudes toward carbon pricing. Using surveys and experiments across Europe and Sweden, the research shows that exposure to increased electricity prices intensify concerns about costs and fairness, increasing opposition to carbon taxes. How governments spend carbon pricing revenues—whether returning them directly to citizens or investing in green projects—also significantly influences public acceptance. Trust in government emerges as another crucial factor, particularly among those actively protesting fuel taxes. Understanding these dynamics can help policymakers design climate policies that are not only effective but also politically feasible.
Court-Ordered Care
(2024-04-29) Helénsdotter, Ronja
This dissertation focuses on one of the most vulnerable groups in society: children and youths who interact with the child protection system. In the first chapter, I study the effects of court-ordered removal of children from their homes and placement in out-of-home care on all-cause mortality, suicide, and accidental overdose. I also examine the effects on hospitalization related to mental illness and substance abuse, criminal behavior, and a range of parent outcomes. In the second chapter, I analyze the effects of peers placed in residential treatment facilities on each other’s outcomes using novel data on the universe of youths (over 16,000) admitted to state-owned treatment facilities in Sweden between 2000 and 2020. In the last chapter of my dissertation, I investigate the role of judges’ experience in the decision to remove children from their homes and the accuracy of these decisions. To further deepen our knowledge about the causes of variation in decision-making, I also examine how judges respond to decisions made by appellate courts.
Telling Talent: Essays on Discrimination and Promotion Contests
(2024-03-11) Behler, Timm
Many of our interactions are shaped by the beliefs we hold about the people we interact with. Because of this, we often try to gather information about others. This information shapes our beliefs, which then inform the decisions we make. For example, believing that one group is inherently worse than another might lead us to discriminate against that group. Similarly, believing that one employee is better than another might lead a manager to promote that employee over the other. This thesis deals with how people collect and interpret information about others, broadly speaking, and applies this to discrimination and promotion contests.
Essays on Environmental and Behavioral Economics
(2023-10-03) Tewodros, Tesemma
As developing countries strive to attain rapid economic growth and thereby reduce poverty, the ensuing climate change crisis is making it necessary for these countries to achieve the targeted economic growth through low-carbon footprint. This thesis investigates the roles of economic agents and their interactions in tackling the twin challenges of poverty reduction and climate change. Chapter 1 focuses on the challenges raised by the passenger transport sector and investigates the effect a recent policy change in Ethiopia that aimed at increasing adoption of fuel-efficient vehicles. Chapter 2 investigates cost of power outages for manufacturing micro, small and medium enterprises. Chapter 3 investigates the intergenerational transmission of positional preferences among households in urban Ethiopia. The last chapter, Chapter 4 focuses on measuring trust in institutions.
Wetland Mitigation Banking in the United States
(2023-08-24) Inkinen, Ville Pekka Tapani
In this thesis, I study market-based biodiversity conservation policies in the context of the wetland compensatory mitigation program under the US Clean Water Act. The program requires developers to compensate for adverse impacts on wetlands by purchasing credits that specialized firms have generated in advance from wetland conservation activities. In this work, I study aspects related to the environmental and economic performance of the program. In the first chapter (with Jessica Coria, João Vaz, and Yann Clough), we evaluate environmental outcomes in the compensatory credit markets. We measure wetland area gains at 400 compensation sites over 1995–2020 using a combination of high-resolution satellite imagery and land cover change data. Comparing realized compensation projects to planned but withdrawn projects in a difference-in-differences framework, we find that the majority of the gains would not have occurred without dedicated conservation activities. Nonetheless, the wetland area gains appear insufficient to compensate for the wetland area losses regulated within the program. In the second chapter (with João Vaz and Jessica Coria), we provide a theoretical examination of the costs and benefits of the two approaches to compensate for impacts: market-based banking mechanisms that entail third-party offsets and the conventional command-and-control approach of developer-led offsets. We find that (1) if offsets by banks are of insufficient quality relative to developer-led offsets, a large enough market could compensate for the lack of equivalency due to cost-savings from market expansion, and (2) if entry costs are positively correlated with restoration quality, the market could hold banks of low quality, which is an outcome that favors the relative performance of developer-led offsets. We illustrate our results empirically in the case of the US wetland mitigation program. In the third chapter, I examine the labor market effects of federal regulations that protect water resources in the United States. The Clean Water Rule, an executive order enacted in 2015, expanded the scope of waters that are federally protected under the Clean Water Act. I use a difference-in-differences framework to compare construction employment between the 22 states where the Rule was implemented and the 28 states where it was never implemented due to litigation in regional courts. I find that the overall effect of the Rule on construction employment was negligible. However, a negative effect appears in the four states that had unsuccessfully litigated against the Rule. Furthermore, the decrease in construction activity was most prominent in counties where low-cost compliance options through environmental offset markets were limited.
Sustainable Consumption and Prosocial Actions
(2023-06-21) David, Bilén
The influence of a single individual's actions on many societal issues is often small, but individual efforts can have a significant impact when combined. Several potential policies could attempt to encourage these actions, including providing information on climate impact, employing nudges, or offering monetary incentives. In the first two chapters, I use large-scale natural experiments to examine interventions aimed at promoting sustainable food consumption. Chapter One investigates the effects of information provision, while Chapter Two explores the combination of monetary incentives and normative appeals. The third chapter concentrates on unconditional generosity, and together with my co-authors, we examine potential gender differences in generosity and assess whether these differences are related to the recipient's needs.
Decentralized Finance and Central Bank Communication
(2023-05-25) Hansson, Magnus
This dissertation investigates two distinct areas within the financial literature: Decentralized finance (DeFi) and central bank communication. Both areas have experienced significant changes in the past decade, posing new challenges to the international financial system. The dissertation comprises three self-contained chapters, each exploring a different aspect of these developments. The first two chapters delve into the realm of DeFi, focusing on price discovery on decentralized exchanges that employ blockchain technology for trade settlement. These papers highlight the crucial role of arbitrageurs in maintaining price efficiency in these markets. The third paper shifts its attention to central bank communication. It employs natural language processing to study the content of central bank speeches, relating its findings to the theory of narrative economics.
Choices among Doctors, Students and Primary Care Providers: Empirical Evidence from Sweden
(2023-02-21) Berggren, Andrea
This thesis consists of three independent chapters. The setting for the first and the third chapter is the primary care sector in Sweden. The second chapter focuses on the consequences of a reform implemented in the Swedish upper secondary school system. In chapter one I study if, and how, children´s health care utilization is affected by the physician’s decision to prescribe antibiotics or not. I document underlying differences in physicians’ antibiotics prescription propensity to children and use these differences as an instrument for analysing the consequences for the individual’s utilization of health care. In the second chapter I study how a reform, aimed at increasing course-taking flexibility, affected students’ choice of courses and program as well as their third cycle educational outcomes. The third chapter focuses on how local media information about primary care centres affects the patient’s choice of primary care provider.
Electoral Cycles, Conflict, Crime, and Pro-environmental Behavior
(2022-08-19) Enlund, Jakob
This thesis consists of three self-contained chapters. The first two focus on violent conflicts: international collective action to mitigate them and their violent and international spill-over effects. The third chapter focus on climate change and examines efforts of individual consumers to mitigate their own impact on it. In chapter one, I document electoral cycles in troop contributions to UN peacekeeping operations and examine their consequences for mission and conflict outcomes. In chapter two, I examine the violent spill-over effects of conflict, focusing on the case of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its effect on hate crime towards Jews and Muslims in the United States. In chapter three, I examine how pro-environmental consumers in Sweden reduce their total consumption-based carbon footprint using a carbon calculator that covers all financial transactions.
Emotions in Game Theory: Fear, friendliness and hostility
(2022-04-28) Andersson, Lina
How do emotions affect our interactions with each other? And how do our interactions with each other affect our emotions? As an adult, one makes thousands of decisions each day, decisions often influenced by our emotional state of mind. We are not oblivious to the relationship between emotions and behavior, but can, to some extent, predict how own and others' emotional states affect actions and how our actions may affect others' emotions. This thesis examines the strategic role of emotions in three chapters. The first chapter studies the strategic role of fear and illustrates how an agent can use her knowledge of another agents fear sensitivity to her own advantage. The second and third chapter studies friendliness and hostility. The second chapter shows how emotional players may find it easier to cooperate in repeated interactions, and the third chapter studies market consequences when buyers are emotionally motivated to write online reviews to inform each other of a product’s quality.
Carpe Diem or Seize your Health? The Economics of Time Preferences, Health, and Education
(2022-01-20) Norrgren, Lisa
Who is more likely to follow medical recommendations, invest in their health and pursue higher degrees of schooling? Behavioral economic theory provides a clear answer to this question: more patient individuals (who discount future outcomes less heavily) should be more likely to choose costs and forgo utility now, in order to get better long-run outcomes. But does this behavioral theory match up with peoples' real choices? If so, can it be used to predict important future life events? In four different chapters, this thesis shed new light on education, illness, and death outcomes. It does so using the information on people’s time preferences, i.e., the relative weight a person gives to future utility compared with present utility. Based on extensive information for people born in 1953 in Stockholm and their mothers, as well as contemporary data from pregnant women in South Africa , the thesis shows that time preferences is an important factor in understanding everyday health investments, social mobility, and long-run health outcomes. Most striking are the results in chapter one, which shows that patient adolescents, compared with their less patient peers, are about 20% less likely to die before age 65.
Providers and Profiteers: Essays on Profits and Competition in the Provision of Public Services
(2021-12-16) Larsson, Sebastian
Public services, such as education and health care, are provided by both public and private actors. In some countries, such as Sweden, these include for-profit organizations. In systems allowing the users to choose freely, the providers must compete, often by offering qualities that the users may care about. This thesis uses both theoretical and empirical techniques to investigate how various policy instruments such as preferential tax treatments, measures to intensify competition, and differentiating the generosity of vouchers between public and private providers may affect the quality of public services. The first chapter studies how a local government can create incentives for private providers of public services to voluntarily restrict profits, and how this affects the quality of services. The second chapter studies how quality is affected by “competitive neutrality,” the restriction that private providers must receive the same funding as competing public providers. The third chapter uses a spatial autoregressive panel model to investigate if competition between public and private schools in Sweden leads to higher levels of grade inflation.
Impacts of Climate Policy and Natural Disasters: Evidence from China
(2021-08-17) Tian, Ruijie
The last decade has seen heightened interest in carbon pricing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions responsible for anthropogenic climate change. Over the past decade, China–responsible for over a quarter of global carbon emissions–has aimed to reduce its emissions through an ambitious Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) which charges certain firms for the greenhouse gases they emit. This dissertation evaluates the behaviour of firms regulated by the pilot ETS and also studies the economic consequences of adverse shocks in the form of natural disasters. The first two chapters analyse the impact of the pilot ETS on firm behaviour in China. Chapter one assesses the impacts of the pilot ETS on technical change. The second chapter evaluates how the pilot ETS affected emissions reduction and whether the initial allowance allocation had no impact on emissions in subsequent years–a necessary condition for a cap-and-trade market to be efficient. The final chapter uses Chinese firm-level data to detect the international propagation of adverse shocks triggered by the US hurricane season in 2005.
Essays on Public Policy in the Informal Sector Context
(2021-05-21) Sjöholm, Carolin
The Price Sensitivity of the Demand for Health Insurance – Evidence from the Community Health Insurance Scheme in Rwanda This study estimates the price elasticity of the demand for health insurance, exploiting the variation in insurance premiums created by the implementation of a new premium subsidy scheme for community-based health insurance in Rwanda. The subsidy scheme created variation in insurance premiums across households, over time. I use the estimated price sensitivity to predict the impact of a number of plausible premium subsidy schemes on two policy-relevant outcomes: insurance coverage and financial sustainability. I find that the demand for health insurance is inelastic, although the price sensitivity varies among different socioeconomic groups. The results suggest that premium subsidies have only a modest effect on the take-up of insurance compared with nonsubsidized premiums, but they affect the composition of individuals enrolled in the insurance. To simulate the financial sustainability of the insurance scheme, measured as the share of total insurer costs covered by insurance premiums, I combine the price elasticity estimates with unique data on insurer costs, enabling me to account for adverse selection. I estimate a positive slope of the average cost curve, consistent with adverse selection. These results indicate that premium subsidies could be a costly policy tool for achieving universal healthcare. JEL Classification: I13, I18, D12, H51, H55 Keywords: community-based health insurance, adverse selection, price sensitivity, financial self-sustainability The Role of Childcare in Firm Performance: Evidence from Female Entrepreneurship in Mexico Microenterprises represent an important source of employment in many developing countries. Earlier literature has documented that female-run microenterprises underperform relative to those run by men on many indicators, although the reasons for this discrepancy in large part remain enigmatic. This paper estimates the importance of childcare obligations as a barrier for female entrepreneurship. I use difference-in-difference and triple-difference designs to study how a federal daycare program affects the performance of female-run microenterprises in Mexico. The program provided childcare services for children under 4 years old whose mothers worked in the informal sector, and varied across time and space. I find no evidence that the program was associated with changes in business performance measured by the likelihood of running a home-based business or having an employee, the number of hours worked, physical capital or the likelihood of applying for a credit. The results are consistent, irrespective of the choice of estimation strategy. JEL Classification: H55, J13, J22, J46, J48 Keywords: microenterprises, female entrepreneurship, childcare, daycare program, Mexico Variation in the Quality of Primary Healthcare – Evidence from Rural and Urban Healthcare Services in Rwanda Disparities in access to quality healthcare within countries represent a potential impediment to reaching the sustainable development goal of better health and well-being for all. In this paper I first identify a disparity in the quality of primary healthcare between rural and urban primary health facilities in Rwanda. Second, I study the importance of differences in structural inputs and contextual factors in explaining this outcome. To measure quality, I construct a quality score that summarizes both structure and process quality indicators. I use administrative data from the performance-based financing scheme to calculate the quality scores. The data was collected during unannounced evaluations of public health centers, performed by teams of professional hospital staff. The results confirm a small but significant quality gap between rural and urban health centers. Rural centers obtain a 1% lower quality score at the mean, or 0.3 standard deviations, compared to urban centers, which potentially mask important differences in the delivery of health services for patients. I find that differences in structural and contextual inputs, such as access to drugs and clinic beds, wage expenditure, and distance to nearest clinic and district hospital, explain only a small share of the difference in quality between rural and urban areas. The results indicate that investment in such factors might not represent an efficient policy tool to eliminate within-country inequalities in access to quality healthcare. JEL Classification: I11, I14, I18 Keywords: healthcare quality, structural inputs, health inequality, structural quality, process quality, Rwanda
Empirical tests of exchange rate and stock return models
(2021-03-31) Lindahl, Anna
Abstracts to ”Empirical tests of exchange rate and stock return models” Order flow in the Foreign Exchange Market Price discovery in foreign exchange markets is explored using Swedish data including trades from both the customer and the interdealer market. The data set represents a majority of all executed trades in the EURSEK exchange rate over a four-year time period. I confirm the presence of an association between interdealer order flows and exchange rate returns on a daily and weekly frequency. At longer horizons the association disappears. Aggregate interdealer order flow appears to be informed, pushing and driving changes in the EURSEK rate. In contrast, both corporate and financial customers seem to react negatively to a price change and get pulled into the market, reacting to previous trade events. Keywords: Foreign exchange microstructure; price discovery; private information JEL codes: F3, F4, G1 Herding the Scapegoats: Foreign Exchange Order Flow and the Time-Varying Effect of Fundamentals The poor performance of macroeconomic exchange rate models in and out-of-sample is well documented in the literature. One reason for this result is the impact of ‘scapegoat’ effects; participants attach different weights to different macro fundamentals in different periods. In contrast, microstructure approaches to exchange rate determination demonstrate the importance of order flow to both explain and forecast exchange rates. Using monthly data sets for order flow and macro ‘fundamentals’ for the five currency pairs ($/€, ¥/$, $/£, NOK/€ and SEK/€) we find evidence supporting scapegoat effects. In particular, (i) the instability in the returns-fundamentals relation is matched by a similar instability in the relation between order flow and fundamentals; and (ii) the predicted order flow from the time-varying relation with fundamentals (macro-induced order flow) has strong explanatory power for spot returns. We conclude that the consistent and more stable impact of order flow, in part, comes from the fact that it absorbs and acts as a sufficient statistic for scapegoat effects. Keywords: Foreign exchange microstructure; unstable fundamentals; scapegoat theory. JEL codes: F31, F41, G15 Commercial Banks' Assets and Future Expected Returns Using in-sample and out-of-sample tests and controlling for data mining, we find that the asset growth of commercial banks strongly predicts the excess returns on stocks, bonds, derivatives, and currencies portfolios. The bank asset factor strongly predicts market excess returns even at a weekly frequency. We find clear patterns across assets in the predictive coefficients: they increase in magnitude from government to corporate bonds to options to stocks. This pattern is consistent with the business risks of the assets, and thus supports a risk-based explanation of the predictive power of commercial banks’ asset growth. We also find that the bank asset factor possesses strong explanatory power for the cross-section of expected asset returns, which backs up the results of the predictability tests. Keywords: Return predictability; data mining; banks’ balance sheets; leverage JEL codes: C10, C13, G12, G21 ISBN: 978-91-88199-53-9 (tryckt), 978-91-88199-54-6 (PDF) Contact information: Anna Lindahl, Department of Economics, School of Business, Economics and Law, University of Gothenburg, Box 640, 405 30 Gothenburg, Sweden. Email: anna.lindahl@economics.gu.se
The Economics of Coercive Institutions, Conflict, and Development
(2020-05-26) Rubio, Melissa
This dissertation is a compilation of three papers that put together my research interests on the effects of institutions on development outcomes with inequality as the connecting thread. The first chapter concerns racial inequality. It explores the role of a fundamental part of American history that could have shaped the large racial disparities in the justice system -the slave-based labor system that prevailed in the United States until 1865. The second chapter studies the effects of conflict on social cohesion. In the final chapter, we propose a measure labor income risk that is mapped to inequality measures.
Essays on Culture, Institutions, and Economic Development
(2020-05-18) Ho, Hoang-Anh
Culture and institutions are important to understand individual behaviors and economic development. In this thesis, I study the origins of cultural divergence across societies, the emergence of private property rights, and the relationship between private property rights and economic development. First, I discover that the selective migration of individualistic people out of collectivistic societies in the past has left its trace in the cultural divergence along the individualism-collectivism dimension in the present. Second, I show that the state devises property rights to land to maximize tax revenue, producing the rise and fall of private property rights to land in response to changes in population density. Third, I find that private land tenure only has a modest impact on rural economic development. Thus, this thesis demonstrates the importance of history in understanding current economic issues, as well as provides valuable lessons on the privatization of agricultural land.

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