The Role of the Weighted Voting System in Investments in Local Public Education: Evidence from a New Historical Database

Abstract

In this paper, we analyze how a weighted voting system introduced in 1862, which shifted the distribution of political power from landowners to industrialists at local town meetings, affected investments in local public education. We use an event study design based on a newly constructed panel data set with annual observations of nearly 2,200 Swedish local governments over 28 years, i.e., more than 60,000 observations. Most importantly, there is no pre-trend in educational spending in our event study but rather a sharp change in the dynamic treatment effects exactly at the date when the treatment occurs, i.e., when industrialists receive more political power at town meetings. The estimated cumulative treatment effect is also economically substantial. For example, per capita spending on education increased by approximately 37% within 6 years in local governments where industrialists came to political power. Our findings are therefore consistent with the idea that political institutions are a key determinant of human capital accumulation and long-run economic development. • This work is financed via an ERC consolidator grant 616496 (Pettersson-Lidbom).

The Effect of a Long-Term Care Insurance Program on Subjective Well-Being of Older Adults with a Disability: Quasi-Experimental Evidence from China

“…Finally, we checked whether variation in the implementation of the LTCI program across cities and time periods affected our main study findings. We used an event study estimator developed by De Chaisemartin and D’Haultfoeuille (2020), De Chaisemartin et al (2021) to consolidate our findings, which is a valid and robust estimator when the treatment effect is heterogeneous or dynamic over time (Garrouste & Zaiem, 2020; Lindgren et al, 2021). In our analysis, we performed these treatment and placebo tests using Stata’s did_multiplegt module.…”

Highway to Hell? Interstate Highway System and Crime

“…Finally, we also add to the literature studying the impact of infrastructure construction in general on local crime and delinquent behavior. While a number of studies have explored the e↵ects of infrastructure construction on local economic outcomes (Faber, 2014;Donaldson, 2018;Banerjee, Duflo and Qian, 2020;Lindgren, Pettersson-Lidbom and Tyrefors, 2021;He, Xie and Zhang, 2020;Chandra and Thompson, 2000;Michaels, 2008), fewer papers have considered the impact on local crime (Montolio, 2018;Agnew, 2020;Baires, Dinarte and Schmidt-Padilla, 2020). We contribute to this emerging literature on infrastructure and crime by studying one of the unintended consequences of the second largest highway network in the world.…”