Documents Olsson, Martin 2 results

"The world is in the midst of a new wave of privatization, with record dollar amounts raised in both developed and developing countries. Using rich Swedish registry data covering two decades from the mid-1990s, we show that privatizations increased unemployment incidence by almost a fifth, and duration by a quarter, relative to peers who remained employed by a state-owned enterprise. This led to almost one million extra days of unemployment for the workers affected. Wages and labor force participation remain unchanged. Furthermore, we show that privatizations have been costly for workers, and therefore for society, only if they took place during recessions. These results shed new light on the welfare costs of privatization and how they can be mitigated."

"Many governments introduced temporary adjustments to counter the economic and health consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. We study the importance of already existing government transfers and pandemic measures to mitigate individual income losses during the pandemic in Sweden using a difference-in-differences approach and population-wide data on monthly earnings and government transfer payments. We find that labor earnings dropped by 2.7 percent in 2020. Existing transfers and pandemic measures reduced earnings losses to 1.5 percent. These average effects mask considerable differences in income losses, which were, by and large, evened out by existing transfers and pandemic measures."