Employment Protection Legislation and Firm Growth : Evidence from a Natural Experiment

A natural experiment is used to identify the causal relationship between employment protection legislation and fi…rm growth. The natural experiment occurred in Sweden in 2001, when an exemption made it possible for fi…rms with less than eleven employees to exclude two workers from the last-in-fi…rst-out principle when dismissing personnel. The estimated average treatment effect of the reform show that the number of employees increased with 0.135 percent in fi…rms with 5-9 employees relative to fi…rms with 10-15 employees, which corresponds to over 5,000 additional jobs per year created by the reform. Firms with ten employees, just below the size threshold, became 3.4 percent less likely to increase their workforce to a level surpassing the threshold, indicating that the last-in-…first-out rule prevented these …firms from growing. Thus, employment protection legislation seems to act as a growth barrier for small fi…rms.

Informal sanctions and conditional cooperation: : A natural experiment on voluntary contributions to a public good.

In a natural experiment, this paper studies the impact of an informal sanctioning mechanism on individuals’ voluntary contribution to a public good. Cross-country skiers’ actual cash contributions in two ski resorts, one with and one without an informal sanctioning system, are used. I find the contributing share to be higher in the informal sanctioning system (79 percent) than in the non-sanctioning system (36 percent). Previous studies in one-shot public good situations have found an increasing conditional contribution (CC) function, i.e. the relationship between expected average contributions of other group members and the individual’s own contribution. In contrast, the present results suggest that the CC-function in the non-sanctioning system is non-increasing at high perceived levels of others’ contribution. This relationship deserves further testing in lab.

E-learning opens the door to the global community. Novice users experiences of e-learning in a Somali University

E-learning has become one of the primary ways of delivering education around the globe. In Somalia, which is a country torn within and from the global community by a prolonged civil war, University of Hargeisa has in collaboration with Dalarna University in Sweden adopted, for the first time, e-learning. This study explores barriers and facilitators to e-learning usage, experienced by students in Somalia’s higher education, using the University of Hargeisa as case study. Interviews were conducted with students to explore how University of Hargeisa’s novice users perceived elearning, and what factors positively and negatively affected their e-learning experiences. The Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) model was used as a framework for interpreting the results. The findings show that, in general, the students have a very positive attitude towards e-learning, and they perceived that e-learning enhanced their educational experience. The communication aspect was found to be especially important for Somali students, as it facilitated a feeling of belonging to the global community of students and scholars and alleviated the war-torn country’s isolation. However, some socio-cultural aspects of students’ communities negatively affected their e-learning experience. This study ends with recommendations based on the empirical findings to promote the use and enhance the experience of e-learning in post conflict Somali educational institutions