We look at the effect of religiosity on social trust, defined as the share of a population that thinks that people in general can be trusted. This is important since social trust is related to many desired outcomes, such as growth, education, democratic stability and subjective well-being. The...

Both institutional quality and institutional stability have been argued to stimulate economic growth. But to improve institutional quality, a country must endure a period of institutional change, which implies at least a little and possibly a lot of institutional instability. We investigate the...

Recent research has documented that competent-looking political candidates do better in U.S. elections and that babyfaced individuals are generally perceived to be less competent than maturefaced individuals. Taken together, this suggests that babyfaced political candidates are perceived as less...

Uppsatsen behandlar påståendet att rättspositivismen, en av Uppsalaskolans centrala läror, ligger bakom en urholkad äganderätt och, rent allmänt, ett svagt rättighetsskydd, en underminering av marknadsekonomin, höga skatter och en expansion av staten. Denna slutsats är inte självklar....

We present new evidence on how generalized trust is formed. Unlike previous studies, we look at the explanatory power of economic institutions, we use newer data, we incorporate more countries, and we use instrumental variables to handle the causality problem. A central result is that legal...

Why are efficiency-enhancing reforms often frail and subject to being undermined over time? Two theories are examined: public-choice theory, which explains this as the possible result of a need, from time to time, to wipe the slate clean in order to retain productivity in the distribution of...

We study the political opinions of Swedish social scientists in seven disciplines. A survey was sent to 4,301 academics at 25 colleges and universities, which makes the coverage of the disciplines included more or less comprehensive. When it comes to party sympathies there are 1.3 academics on...

We study the role of beauty in politics. For the first time, focus is put on differences in how women and men evaluate female and male candidates and how different candidate traits relate to success in real and hypothetical elections. We have collected 16,218 assessments by 2,772 respondents of...

In the main, Hayek favored rules that apply equally to all and located such rules in tradition, beyond conscious construction. This led Hayek to attack Keynes’s immoralism, i.e. the position that one should be free to choose how to lead one’s life irrespective of the informal institutions in...

While studies of the relationship between economic freedom and economic growth have shown it to be positive, significant and robust, it has rightly been argued that different areas of economic freedom may have quite different effects on growth. Along that line, Carlsson and Lundström (2002)...