Immigrant integration is key to realizing the potential of international migration in economic development. However, integration is often thought to be hampered by immigrants' limited social networks beyond their co-ethnics. We study how contact with natives affects immigrants' social and economic outcomes through a field experiment. We have partnered with an NGO in Sweden that annually matches over one thousand pairs of native Swedes and immigrants for informal meeting to promote new social connections and facilitate integration. Using an RCT and a combination of survey and administrative register data, we will study how such matches with native Swedes affect immigrants' social relations and values, and whether they lead to better labor and housing market outcomes via access to information or referrals. We will also examine changes in immigrants' attachment to their country of origin and remittances to family and friends outside Sweden.
We present estimates of the number of refugees expected to flee Ukraine and to which countries they are expected to migrate based on migration preferences data from the Gallup World Poll. This is important in terms of both immediate refugee assistance efforts and long-term integration policies. Our key finding is that as many as twelve million people may want to leave Ukraine permanently and that refugee policies in potential destination countries are likely to have a substantial impact on the distribution of Ukrainian refugees between different countries. More specifically, international solidarity in response to the migration crisis would significantly reduce the refugee flows to EU countries, incur a limited burden on non-EU countries, and, at the same time, better take the preferences of the Ukrainians into account.
We estimate trends in global earnings dispersion across occupational groups by constructing a new database that covers 68 developed and developing countries between 1970 and 2018. Our main finding is that global earnings inequality has fallen, primarily during the 2000s and 2010s, when the global Gini coefficient dropped by 15 points and the earnings share of the world's poorest half doubled. Decomposition analyses show earnings convergence between countries and within occupations, while within-country earnings inequality has increased. Moreover, the falling global inequality trend was driven mainly by real wage growth, rather than changes in hours worked, taxes or occupational employment.
We apply a panel of 331 microfinance institutions from 37 countries to investigate the relationship between social beliefs and microfinance financial performance over the period of 2003-2011. We find that microfinance institutions in countries with higher levels of trust and more collectivist culture have lower operating and default costs and charge lower interest rates. These results provide the first large cross‐country evidence that social beliefs are important determinants of microfinance performance.
This study pushes our understanding of research reliability by reproducing and replicating claims from 110 papers in leading economic and political science journals. The analysis involves computational reproducibility checks and robustness assessments. It reveals several patterns. First, we uncover a high rate of fully computationally reproducible results (over 85%). Second, excluding minor issues like missing packages or broken pathways, we uncover coding errors for about 25% of studies, with some studies containing multiple errors. Third, we test the robustness of the results to 5,511 re-analyses. We find a robustness reproducibility of about 70%. Robustness reproducibility rates are relatively higher for re-analyses that introduce new data and lower for re-analyses that change the sample or the definition of the dependent variable. Fourth, 52% of re-analysis effect size estimates are smaller than the original published estimates and the average statistical significance of a re-analysis is 77% of the original. Lastly, we rely on six teams of researchers working independently to answer eight additional research questions on the determinants of robustness reproducibility. Most teams find a negative relationship between replicators’ experience and reproducibility, while finding no relationship between reproducibility and the provision of intermediate or even raw data combined with the necessary cleaning codes.
I analyze the relationship between individualism and preferences for redistribution, using variation in immigrants’ countries of origin to capture the impact of cultural values and beliefs on personal attitudes towards income redistribution and equality. Using global individual-level survey data for almost one million individuals (including 65,000 migrants) in a large number of countries around the world, I find strong support for the hypothesis that more individualistic cultures are associated with lower preferences for redistribution. At the same time, cultural assimilation in this dimension seems to take place relatively fast, where the impact of the destination culture starts to dominate the origin culture when an individual has lived as long in the country of destination as she did in her country of origin. Moreover, I find no statistically significant effect of the origin culture on an individual’s preferences for redistribution if migration took place before the age of 10. The results are confirmed using a variety of robustness checks, including the grammatical rule of a pronoun drop as an instrumental variable.
We provide new evidence on income inequality levels and trends in Sweden from 1968 to 2016. By combining data from tax and population registers, we construct a new dataset that includes the distribution of pre-tax total and post-tax disposable income from labor, business, capital, transfers and benefits, for the full Swedish population since 1968. As such, we can also compare income inequality for both individuals and various household concepts. Our estimates extend Statistics Sweden's official inequality series based on full-population registers (available since 2011) by more than four decades. Our results indicate that the 1980s was the decade with the lowest level of overall income inequality in Sweden (as measured by the Gini coefficient), while income inequality as measured by top income shares for the very top (top 0.001%) has increased steadily over the studied period.

"Community Sponsorship for Refugee Integration: A Randomized Evaluation"
(with Mounir Karadja and Akib Khan)

We use an RCT to evaluate the UN refugee-agency UNHCR's Community Sponsorship (CS) model in Sweden. The CS model matches newly arrived refugees with local contacts from the host municipality in order to improve language skills, cultural exchange, and new social networks. We have partnered with several municipalities that work closely with the local CSOs to create these matches. Our study will be the first randomized evaluation of this popular program, which has helped resettle hundreds of thousands of refugees worldwide. As such, this project will contribute to the broad research and societal discussion on integration by studying an innovative and scalable intervention. We evaluate the intervention based on its effects on social and economic integration, as well as values, health, and well-being.

"Rethinking Global Wealth Inequality: The Role of Human Capital"
(with Daniel Waldenström)

We estimate the global distribution of human capital using micro-data evidence on lifetime incomes for a large number of countries in all regions of the world. We also match these human capital estimates with micro-data records on personal wealth in property and net financial assets, constructing the first global distribution of total human, produced and natural wealth. We corroborate the results using alternative measures of human capital, such as years of education.

"Wealth Inequality in Sweden, 1968-2016"
(with Paula Roth, Felicia Stokke and Daniel Waldenström)

This paper presents new evidence on individual and households wealth for the full Swedish population and estimates of wealth inequality between 1968 and 2016. The data come from a large number of administrative and private, corporate registers, many of which have never before been used before in this context. The aggregate household balance sheet is made consistent with the national and financial accounts of Sweden in all years. Results will be shown for the Gini coefficient, top and bottom wealth shares, and decompositions across asset classes and wealth holder groups.

"Longitudinal Changes in Non-European Migrant Values and Social Norms in Sweden"
(with Bi Puranen and Christian Welzel)

What happens with an individual's values when he or she migrates to a new country with other social norms than in the country of origin? In this project, we study cultural change among migrants by analyzing individual-level survey data from a large sample of non-European migrants in Sweden collected through the Migrant World Values Survey. The case of Sweden is interesting both for being a country that has recently experienced a large increase in its foreign-born population share, and also for having cultural values quite distinct from the average among its recent immigrant waves. In the study, we first analyze how selected the Swedish immigrants are by comparing the values of newly arrived migrants to the average in their origin country or cultural zone. Second, by comparing similar immigrants that have lived differently long in Sweden, we study the speed of cultural convergence in different cultural dimensions including values related to trust, choice, family, religion, and politics. Third, we also analyze the potential determinants of this cultural integration speed, including gender, age, income, education, employment, language, demographics, origin and cohort effects. Our study contributes to the literature on migration and cultural change, and will have important policy implications regarding the inclusion and integration of migrants.

"Distributional National Accounts in the Welfare State: Sweden, 1930-2020"
(with Paula Roth, Daniel Waldenström and Gabriel Zucman)

This paper presents new evidence on the evolution of income and wealth inequality in Sweden since 1930. The basis for the analysis is the distributional national accounts (DINA) methodology and to match individual register data with macroeconomic totals from the national accounts and thereby compute new estimates of pre- and post-tax/transfer distributions of income and wealth in Sweden. The paper makes several contributions to the literature on income and wealth distribution. It is the first paper to apply the recent DINA methodology using full-population administrative registers that cover multi-decadal panels. This allows for an extensive scrutiny of a range of the assumptions and method approaches used in past DINA-studies of, e.g., inequality in the US and France. Furthermore, the paper will be the first one that studies the DINA series for a Scandinavian welfare state, Sweden, over its entire evolution since 1930.
Gethin, Martínez-Toledano and Piketty (2022) analyze the long-run evolution of political cleavages using a new database on socioeconomic determinants of voting from approximately 300 elections in 21 Western democracies between 1948 and 2020. They find that, in the 1950s and 1960s, voting for the "left" was associated with lower-educated and low-income voters. After that, voting for the "left" has gradually become associated with higher-educated voters, while high-income voters have continued to vote for the "right". In the 2010s, there is a disconnection between the effects of income and education on voting. In this replication, we first conduct a computational reproduction, using the replication package provided by the authors. Second, we do a robustness replication testing to what extent the original results are robust to i) restricting the sample to "core" left and right parties, ii) analyzing the top 80% versus bottom 20%, iii) weighting by population, iv) dropping control variables, and v) using country fixed effects. The main results of the paper are found to be largely replicable and robust.

Other Publications (in Swedish)

"Vetenskapsrådet och nationalekonomerna"
Ekonomisk Debatt 52(1): 79-85, 2024 (with Erik Mohlin)