What are the consequences of domestic violence? What are the factors behind domestic violence? How does war affect the prevalence of gender violence in conflict areas and post conflicts? On 11 May 2022, the Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics (SITE) together with the Centre for Economic Analysis (CenEA) and the FREE Network hosted a hybrid conference focused on 'Economic and social context of domestic violence' with a special panel session on ‘Dimensions of gender-based violence in military conflicts’.

Sanctions imposed on Russia after its invasion of Ukraine are argued to be the strongest and farthest-reaching imposed on a major power after WWII, more numerous and more comprehensive than all other measures currently in force against all other sanctioned countries. A question often asked, which is hard to answer, is whether sanctions are effective.

Last week students visited the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies as part of their course in applied history. They listened to lectures about the Cold War from leading scholars and visited historical sites in the American capital.

Everybody is deeply shaken by the horror of war, but there are some gender differences in the type of harm that individuals face. Acknowledging the specific risk that women face during wartime in order to target interventions is important, especially considering that often the actors that sit at peace negotiation tables are exclusively men. Pamela Campa, Assistant Professor at Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics (SITE), discusses the risks that women face during a war conflict.

The world is currently experiencing what can be labelled as a global energy crisis, with surging prices for oil, coal, and natural gas. For households in Sweden and abroad, this translates into higher gasoline and diesel prices at the pump as well as increased electricity and heating costs. In this policy brief, Julius Andersson, Assistant Professor at SITE, together with Celina Tippmann, Research Assistant at SITE, put the current gasoline price in Sweden into a historical context and answer two related questions: are Swedish households paying more today for gasoline than ever before? And should policymakers respond by reducing gasoline taxes?

This brief provides an overview of the discussion on the relative merits of grants and loans in the literature on foreign aid, including a short section on debt relief initiatives. These claims are then tested against the context of Ukrainian post-war reconstruction, and it is argued that the case for providing grants is very strong. This argument is based on the magnitude of the investments needed, the need to create a long-run sustainable economy, the road towards a future EU membership, and the global value of a democratic and prosperous Ukraine as a bulwark against autocratic forces.

Since the beginning of the Russia-Ukraine war, the West has been contemplating sanctions on Russian oil and gas imports. For the EU, this plan poses a significant challenge due to the long-existing sizable dependency on Russian energy. In this brief, we outline the possible effects of banning Russian oil and gas on the energy import bill across the EU.

Earmarked projects receive lower peer-review scores than non-earmarked projects, but do not consistently underperform in terms of tangible outputs like patents and publications. This, according to new research from the Stockholm School of Economics, the WHO Otto Beisheim School of Management, and the University of Groningen.

The course in applied history takes students to Peterhouse College and the Centre for Geopolitics, where they learn about the past from prominent historians.

In recent decades, a new breed of media-savvy strongmen has been redesigning authoritarian rule for a more sophisticated, globally connected world. What do we know about these "Spin Dictators"?