On the Economics and Politics of Mobility

Exit, Voice and Political Change: Evidence from Swedish Mass Migration to the United States. During the Age of Mass Migration, 30 million Europeans immigrated to the United States. We study the long-term political effects of this large-scale migration episode on origin communities using detailed historical data from Sweden. To instrument for emigration, we exploit severe local frost shocks that sparked an initial wave of emigration, interacted with within-country travel costs. Because Swedish emigration was highly path dependent, the initial shocks strongly predict total emigration over 50 years. Our estimates show that emigration substantially increased membership in local labor organizations, the strongest political opposition groups at the time. Furthermore, emigration caused greater strike participation, and mobilized voter turnout and support for left-wing parties in national elections. Emigration also had formal political effects, as measured by welfare expenditures and adoption of inclusive political institutions. Together, our findings indicate that large-scale emigration can achieve long-lasting effects on the political equilibrium in origin communities. Mass Migration and Technological Innovation at the Origin. This essay studies the effects of migration on technological innovations in origin communities. Using historical data from Sweden, we find that large-scale emigration caused a long-run increase in patent innovations in origin municipalities. Our IV estimate shows that a ten percent increase in emigration entails a 7 percent increase in a muncipality’s number of patents. Weighting patents by a measure of their economic value, the positive effects are further increased. Discussing possible mechanisms, we suggest that low skilled labor scarcity may be an explanation for these results.  Richer (and Holier) Than Thou? The Impact of Relative Income Improvements on Demand for Redistribution. We use a tailor-made survey on a Swedish sample to investigate how individuals' relative income affects their demand for redistribution. We first document that a majority misperceive their position in the income distribution and believe that they are poorer, relative to others, than they actually are. We then inform a subsample about their true relative income, and find that individuals who are richer than they initially thought demand less redistribution. This result is driven by individuals with prior right-of-center political preferences who view taxes as distortive and believe that effort, rather than luck, drives individual economic success. Wealth, home ownership and mobility. Rent controls on housing have long been thought to reduce labor mobility and allocative efficiency. We study a policy that allowed renters to purchase their rent-controlled apartments at below market prices, and examine the effects of home ownership and wealth on mobility. Treated individuals have a substantially higher likelihood of moving to a new home in a given year. The effect corresponds to a 30 percent increase from the control group mean. The size of the wealth shock predicts lower mobility, while the positive average effect can be explained by tenants switching from the previous rent-controlled system to market-priced condominiums. By contrast, we do not find that the increase in residential mobility leads to a greater probability of moving to a new place of work.

Modeling long-term variability and change of soil moisture and groundwater level - from catchment to global scale

The water stored in and flowing through the subsurface is fundamental for sustaining human activities and needs, feeding water and its constituents to surface water bodies and supporting the functioning of their ecosystems. Quantifying the changes that affect the subsurface water is crucial for our understanding of its dynamics and changes driven by climate change and other changes in the landscape, such as in land-use and water-use. It is inherently difficult to directly measure soil moisture and groundwater levels over large spatial scales and long times. Models are therefore needed to capture the soil moisture and groundwater level dynamics over such large spatiotemporal scales. This thesis develops a modeling framework that allows for long-term catchment-scale screening of soil moisture and groundwater level changes. The novelty in this development resides in an explicit link drawn between catchment-scale hydroclimatic and soil hydraulics conditions, using observed runoff data as an approximation of soil water flux and accounting for the effects of snow storage-melting dynamics on that flux. Both past and future relative changes can be assessed by use of this modeling framework, with future change projections based on common climate model outputs. By direct model-observation comparison, the thesis shows that the developed modeling framework can reproduce the temporal variability of large-scale changes in soil water storage, as obtained from the GRACE satellite product, for most of 25 large study catchments around the world. Also compared with locally measured soil water content and groundwater level in 10 U.S. catchments, the modeling approach can reasonably well reproduce relative seasonal fluctuations around long-term average values. The developed modeling framework is further used to project soil moisture changes due to expected future climate change for 81 catchments around the world. The future soil moisture changes depend on the considered radiative forcing scenario (RCP) but are overall large for the occurrence frequency of dry and wet events and the inter-annual variability of seasonal soil moisture. These changes tend to be higher for the dry events and the dry season, respectively, than for the corresponding wet quantities, indicating increased drought risk for some parts of the world.