More than 50 years after independence, the majority of countries in Sub-Saharan Africa remain poor with limited rates of economic growth. One of the most striking features of economic development on the sub-Saharan subcontinent is the remarkably poor performance of French colonies relative to...

Social trust is typically measured using surveys that ask people if they agree that most people can be trusted. A potential problem is that falling response rates plague these surveys. If nonresponses are systematic, comparisons of social trust over time will be biased. We examine social and...

Social trust is linked to many desirable economic and social outcomes, but the causality between trust and institutions is debated. Using new data from a representative sample of 2,668 Swedish expatriates (surveyed in the SOM Institute's Swedish Expatriate Survey 2014), we use variation in time...

This paper analyzes how the possibility to complement social income insurance schemes with private insurance affects the political support for social insurance. It is shown that political support for social insurance is weakly decreasing in the replacement rate. Policy makers seeking to maintain...

This paper discusses a number of questions with regard to Sweden's economic and political development: How did Sweden become rich? What explains Sweden's high level of income equality? What were the causes of Sweden's problems from 1970 to 1995? How is it possible that Sweden, since the crisis...

Welfare services are an important part of the Nordic welfare states both financially and for welfare state redistribution. Baumol's cost disease, Wagner's law, and population ageing are often said to bring challenges for the future provision of welfare services. While none of the three poses an...

This note describes how research on the link between globalization and openness has changed over time. Early contributions assumed that countries develop welfare states to compensate for volatility caused by economic openness (the compensation hypothesis). Recent findings have cast doubts on...

In most OECD-countries, immigrants have lower employment and higher unemployment than natives. This paper compares nine potential explanations of these gaps. Results are obtained for 21-28 countries using bivariate correlations, OLS-regressions and Bayesian model averaging over all 512...

The idea that all types of economic freedom - including limited government - promote prosperity is challenged by the fact that some countries successfully combine a large public sector with high taxes and otherwise high levels of economic freedom. To explain the co-existence of economic freedom...

Using World Bank data on institutional quality and the KOF Globalization Index, we examine over 100 countries from 1992 to 2010 to analyze the relationship between economic and social globalization and six measures of institutional quality. Theoretically, the incentives of elites to respond to...