How economic expectations shape preferences for national independence : Evidence from Greenland

This paper investigates how economic expectations shape voting intentions in a hypothetical independence referendum in Greenland, a self-governing region of the Kingdom of Denmark. I identify the causal effect of economic expectations by randomly exposing respondents to a prime informing on Greenland's current fiscal deficit. Respondents exposed to the information are 43% more likely to oppose independence, an effect I attribute to (a) worsened economic expectations and (b) greater political participation among pessimistic respondents. I further document that the impact of the prime depends on respondents’ ties to the political union. While information exposure substantially increases opposition to independence among voters with strong ties to Denmark, voting intentions are essentially unchanged for respondents with weak ties to Denmark. Still, instrumental motives shape preferences for a sufficiently large proportion of voters for the information prime to alter the outcome of the independence referendum

Essays on the political economy of development: Determinants of political and economic behavior

This PhD dissertation consists of four self-contained chapters in the field of Political Development Economics. They are all empirical projects studying decision-making under heterogeneous conditions. In the first chapter, I investigate the causal link between economic expectations and voting in an independence referendum, and document that the effect is contingent upon voters' identity. In the second chapter we map state capacity at the subnational level in Africa and show that the risk of oil induced conflicts depends on levels of local state capacity. The third chapter focuses on the link between food scarcity and cooperative investments. Exploiting the harvest as an exogenous shock to food supply in rural Tanzania, we document a causal role of food scarcity in suppressing socially efficient cooperation. The fourth and final chapter studies moral decision making in Greenland. We develop a measure of parochial honesty - the propensity to behave honestly toward the ingroup but not toward the outgroup - and show that market exposure predicts the degree of group differentiation

On the Nexus Between Material and Ideological Determinants of Climate Policy Support

<p>Contains the material necessary to replicate the results in "On the Nexus Between Material and Ideological Determinants of Climate Policy Support" (Agneman, et al., 2024). Ecological Economics.</p&gt

KOMMUNALSKATTER OCH KONJUNKTUR

Fiscal policy and its consequences have attracted much attention on both academic and societal level, in Sweden and elsewhere. However, the dependence between fiscal policy on municipality level and business cycles has only recently sparked a debate among Swedish economists. Studies point out that a law which came to force in 2000, balanskravet, may have caused municipalities to lower expenditures, alternatively raising taxes, during recessions. This thesis examines how the level of municipality taxes depends on business cycle fluctuations and the impact that balanskravet has had on this correlation. We employ econometric regressions, with annual data covering the period 1980-2014, to enable an analysis of the dependence between taxes and business cycles, both before and after the introduction of balanskravet. The outcome of our tests indicates that a procyclical tax-behavior has existed throughout the studied period. However, contrary to the critique on balanskravet, the law does not seem to have had the expected enhancing effect on this behavior. Even so, the finding that tax policy among Swedish municipalities is conducted procyclical is problematic, according to economic theory. This thesis provides recommendations on further policy reforms in order to enable municipalities to avoid procyclical taxing

The Material Basis of Cooperation: How Scarcity Reduces Trusting Behaviour

Trusting behaviour is a cornerstone of cooperation and, hence, economic performance, not least in poorer communities where economic transactions often rely on informal agreements. But trusting behaviour is potentially costly since the counterpart may decide to defect. In this study, we investigate whether food scarcity influences the level of trusting behaviour in rural Tanzania by leveraging quasi-experimental variation in food supply induced by the harvest. Through a lab-in-the-field experiment, we document that farmers display lower levels of trusting behaviour during the lean season compared to the abundant season and show that the difference is explained by variation in food scarcity