A new study shows that Ukraine’s postwar recovery isn't just about repairing roads and homes, but about creating a stronger economy, democratic institutions, and a future-proof nation. In this study, Torbjörn Becker, Yuriy Gorodnichenko, and Beatrice Weder di Mauro offer a sweeping review of hundreds of policy proposals in the Annual Review of Economics, outlining what it will take to rebuild Ukraine after war.

A paper published in The Economic Journal shows how student learning in a fragile and low-income context can be helped by more intensive use of existing textbooks for home study.

In this working paper, researchers from SITE analyze how prostitution laws affect sex tourism, studying legal changes in four countries and their impact on tourism flows.

In this working paper, forthcoming in the Journal of Development Studies, researchers from SITE examines foreign aid's influence on women's empowerment in Malawi using geo-coded data. Positive impacts are observed, but context matters—gender-targeted aid varies in efficacy across communities.

Sweden has attracted a lot of interest as one of few countries that did not impose mandatory lockdowns or curfews in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. New research studies show local Swedish media in this environment affect individual behavior. Read the latest SITE working paper where researchers Marcel Garz (Jönköping University) and Maiting Zhuang (SITE), investigate the effects of media coverage on compliance with public health recommendations during the Covid-19 pandemic in Sweden.

SITE and NES (New Economic School) researchers investigate how multinational firms manage their relationships with governments under the threat of expropriation. Exploring micro data from the oil and gas industry worldwide, they show that the multinationals delay investment, production and tax payments by more than five years in countries with weak institutions relative to countries with strong ones. These findings are consistent with the theory suggesting that delaying rents to the government in absence of formal enforcement could decrease the risk of expropriation.

SITE and FREE Network researchers investigate the factors that correlate with awareness and support for domestic violence legislation in Latvia, Russia and Ukraine, three countries that introduced recent reforms. The working paper is based on a cross-country survey on perceptions and prevalence of domestic and gender-based violence conducted within the FROGEE project.

SITE researchers Maria Perrotta Berlin and Anders Olofsgård together with SITE research affiliated faculty Raj M. Desai (Georgetown University and Brookings Institution) examine the effect of a country's membership in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) on the subnational distribution of World Bank aid. They find support for the hypothesis that aid recipient governments are better able to utilize aid flows for political favoritism during periods in which they are of geo-strategic value to major donors.

Working paper: In recent years we have seen a rapid increase in legislation governing, protecting, and rewarding whistleblowers. More recently, EU enacted a directive protecting whistleblowers, the US has gone one step further long ago. In this paper, SITE researchers review the evidence for the effectiveness of US whistleblower reward programs and consider some recent novelties.

Working paper: The last two decades have uncovered a concerning range of corporate wrongdoing by large European firms in a wide variety of industries. What has driven European firms to engage in such systematic wrongdoing? In this article, SITE researcher Giancarlo Spagnolo and co-author Theo Nyreröd use data on US investigations to identify the European countries hosting most corporate wrongdoers.