News
Reopening soon? Eastern Europe in the post COVID-19 world
14 June 2021
How will countries in Eastern Europe, the Baltic Sea region, and the Caucasus region handles the opening of their respective borders and what is the next step in the socioeconomic aspects?
Development aid – what do research say about its effects and potential?
02 June 2021
In Ekonomisk Debatt, SITE researcher Anders Olofsgård sheds light into what we can learn about the effectiveness of development aid from literatures at the macro, micro and meso- levels. What are we talking about when we talk about development aid?
The southern Urals as a touchstone for Soviet wartime performance
27 May 2021
Policy brief: As time passes and archives open, ever more topics in Russian military-economic history can be studied with primary sources. One such theme is the colossal evacuation of industrial enterprises and equipment from July 1941 onwards. Thousands of railway cars and lorries carried equipment, raw materials, as well as personnel from Ukraine, the Baltics, and western regions of the Russian Federation to the Urals and beyond.
Carbon tax regressivity and income inequality
17 May 2021
Policy brief: A common presumption in economics is that a carbon tax is regressive – that the tax disproportionately burdens low-income households. However, this presumption originates from early research on carbon taxes that used US data, and little is known about the factors that determine the level of regressivity of carbon taxation across countries.
Organizing Time Exchanges: Lessons from Matching Markets
04 May 2021
The Erasmus Program in Europe and the Tuition Fee Exchange in the US are just two examples of time exchange markets. Despite existing for decades, these markets experience a whole set of issues such as coordination problems and imbalanced outcomes. In this recently published paper, Professor Tommy Andersson, Affiliated Professor at Department of Economics, and coauthors construct a non-manipulative mechanism, that maximizes exchanges among participating agents.
Placement Optimization in Refugee Resettlement
03 May 2021
In a recently published paper, Professor Tommy Andersson, Affiliated Professor at
Department of Economics, together with co-authors developed an innovative software tool, Annie™ Moore, integrating machine learning and integer optimization to support a US resettlement agency with their matching operations.
Inequality in the pandemic: Evidence from Sweden
28 April 2021
Policy brief: Most reports on the labor-market effects of the first wave of COVID-19 have pointed to women, low-skilled workers and other vulnerable groups being more affected. Research on the topic shows a more mixed picture. Researchers from the Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics (SITE); Pamela Campa, Jesper Roine and Svante Strömberg explores the Swedish labor market during COVID-19 crisis.
Does the mode of teaching influence learning outcomes?
26 April 2021
The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic put higher education institutions in front of a tremendous challenge: how to provide quality education, while guarantying students and faculty safety? SSE PhD students Erik Merkus and Felix Schafmeister, provide evidence on whether being assigned to online tutorials vis-à-vis attending them in classroom affect students’ learning outcomes.
The future of energy storage: challenges and opportunities
26 April 2021
Policy brief: As the dramatic consequences of climate change are starting to unfold, addressing the intermittency of low-carbon energy sources, such as solar and wind, is crucial. The obvious solution to intermittency is energy storage. However, its constraints and implications are far from trivial. Developing and facilitating energy storage is associated with technological difficulties as well as economic and regulatory problems that need to be addressed to spur investments and foster competition. With these issues in mind, the annual Energy Talk, organized by the Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics, invited three experts to discuss the challenges and opportunities of energy storage.
Domestic violence – the case of Sweden during the pandemic
21 April 2021
Policy brief: Violence within the home is the most common form of interpersonal violence for women. While children and men are also victims of abuse of various kind within the family, intimate partner violence committed by men against women is generally the most common form of domestic violence. Has intimate partner violence increased in Sweden during the current COVID-19 pandemic?