We re-analyze two research articles with results showing that Sweden’s criminalization of purchasing sex triggered a large increase in rape. Our analysis documents discrepancies that produce unreliable results in five identification strategies in the first paper (Ciacci, 2024), and in all specifications indicating a large reform effect in the other (Ciacci, 2025). These discrepancies include estimating different statistical relationships, using different methods, or employing different variables than the paper describes. Correcting them by implementing the analysis described in the text yields no evidence that the Swedish reform increased rape.

We develop an information-based intervention against sexual harassment and test it in a randomized control trial across small groups of military recruits in the boot camp of the Norwegian military. The intervention seeks to bridge two knowledge gaps with implications for sexual harassment prevalence. We tell some recruits about their peers’ beliefs that “telling sexualized jokes can be labeled sexual harassment” and about women soldiers’ equal performance on military skill tests. This treatment gives lasting improvements in knowledge about what sexual harassment is and about women’s job performance. The impact on sexual harassment prevalence is directionally negative but statistically insignificant. We discuss measurement error and use survey responses about a harassment scenario to argue that the intervention likely affected behavior. Our study provides the first field experiment to evaluate whether a prevention method against sexual harassment reduces prevalence in a work setting. We use insights from our research process to identify methodological pitfalls and provide guidance for future field experiments in this area.

We develop an information-based intervention against sexual harassment and test it in a randomized control trial across small groups of military recruits in the boot camp of the Norwegian military. The intervention seeks to bridge two knowledge gaps with implications for sexual harassment prevalence. We tell some recruits about their peers’ beliefs that “telling sexualized jokes can be labeled sexual harassment” and about women soldiers’ equal performance on military skill tests. This treatment gives lasting improvements in knowledge about what sexual harassment is and about women’s job performance. The impact on sexual harassment prevalence is directionally negative but statistically insignificant. We discuss measurement error and use survey responses about a harassment scenario to argue that the intervention likely affected behavior. Our study provides the first field experiment to evaluate whether a prevention method against sexual harassment reduces prevalence in a work setting. We use insights from our research process to identify methodological pitfalls and provide guidance for future field experiments in this area.

First-generation immigrants face a seniority ceiling that limits their political incorporation as candidates and officeholders. Career ladders that require qualification time in lower positions create structural barriers for this group. We use linked data from Swedish electoral ballots andadministrative records to examine this idea. A novel identification strategy isolates the effect of seniority-based promotion structures from immigrant-specific disadvantages by comparing immigrants’ incorporation patterns to those of internal movers—native-born Swedes whorelocate between municipalities. The seniority ceiling explains about half of the immigrant-native gap in holding political positions and almost the entire gradient of worsening incorporation at higher levels. We find strong selection effects at both the individual and group level. The seniority ceiling restricts incorporation at higher career steps for those with fewer opportunities to accumulate qualification time: those who arrived more recently or at older ages.

We use detailed Swedish data to compare patterns of labor market experiences between political candidates from four party families. These pattens align with Kitschelt’s (1994) theory on how labor market experiences shape political ideology. Candidates in traditional left and right parties differ in experiences predicted to drive left–right ideology: Social Democrats own less capital and work in the public sector, whereas Conservatives are more likely to own or manage private businesses. The new left and right parties differ mainly in experiences predicted to drive authoritarian–libertarian ideology: Green Party politicians more often hold human-interactive jobs (e.g., teachers, nurses, and other health professionals) and are more likely to be women with tertiary education, whereas Sweden Democrat politicians are more likely to hold object-manipulating, routine jobs with little autonomy (e.g., machine and vehicle operators). These patterns of common experiences within parties have implications for policy platforms, party stability, and ideological cohesion.

This paper describes sexual harassment risks from two groups of perpetrators in Swedish nationally representative survey data. We find that both women and men face elevated risks of intraorganizational sexual harassment from colleagues or managers when working in occupations dominated by the opposite sex. In contrast, they face elevated risks of extraorganizational harassment from outside groups like patients, customers, or clients when working in women-dominated occupations. Amounts of interpersonal contacts with potential perpetrators appears to be a relevant mechanism behind these patterns: gender minorities in occupations have more workplace interactions with individuals of the opposite sex, and workers in women-dominated occupations have more interactions with outside groups. The results also suggest that gender norms on occupation choice further contribute to the victimization of gender minorities at the hands of both perpetrator groups.

Prior studies have documented that working-class individuals rarely become parliamentarians. We know less about when in the career pipeline to parliament workers disappear, and why. We study these questions using detailed data on the universe of Swedish politicians’ careers over a 50-year period. We find roughly equal-sized declines in the proportion of workers on various rungs of the political career ladder ranging from local to national office. We reject the potential explanations that workers lack political ambition, public service motivation, honesty, or voter support. And while workers’ average high school grades and cognitive test scores are lower, this cannot explain their large promotion disadvantage, a situation that we label a class ceiling. Organizational ties to blue-collar unions help workers advance, but only to lower-level positions in left-leaning parties. We conclude that efforts to improve workers’ numerical representation should apply throughout the career ladder and focus on intra-party processes.

Local political assemblies often perform essential political and governing functions. We introduce the Swedish Municipal Council Database (SMCD), which contains information on municipal council size and the number of elected councilors by gender and party family over a period of 100 years (1919–2018). We describe how this new database enables novel analysis of the development of democracy.

This article studies the political economy of local politicians’ residential neighborhoods. We use Swedish data on the location of all politicians’ and citizens’ homes and their socioeconomic traits. A descriptive analysis shows that politicians live in neighborhoods with more socioeconomically advantaged residents and more of their own party’s voters. Next, we analyze whether having politicians in a neighborhood reduces the likelihood that new buildings are placed there, since these projects often generate local opposition. This analysis compares the neighborhoods of politicians with different degrees of political power and is restricted to close elections. We find that the presence of more politicians with governing power reduces the neighborhood’s proportion of new approved building permits for multifamily homes but not for single-family homes. The result is most likely explained by undue favoritism. We conclude that spatial political representation matters and that unequal spatial representation can increase geographic economic inequality. 

An understanding of differences in nonmonetary work conditions is fundamental for a complete characterization of individuals’ well-being at work. Thus, to fully characterize gender inequalities in the labor market, scholars have begun to explore gender differences in nonmonetary work conditions. We examine one such condition—meaningful work—using nationally representative survey data linked with worker and employer administrative data. We document a large and expanding gender gap in meaningful work, wherein women experience their jobs as more meaningful than men do. We then explore patterns underlying this difference. We find little correlation between women’s higher experience of meaningful work and either labor market decisions related to first parenthood or women’s underrepresentation in leadership jobs. Instead, the gender gap appears to be highly correlated with the sorting of more women into occupations with a high level of beneficence: the sense of having a prosocial impact. Though both women and men experience such jobs as more meaningful, women do so by a larger margin. Next, we consider the relationship between the gender difference in meaningful work and the gender wage gap, contributing to the discussion on compensating differentials in work amenities. We find that, whereas the gender gap in meaningful work closes a substantial part of the wage gap in lower paid jobs, it does little to close the gap in higher paid jobs in which the gender wage gap is largest.