Can a visit from a world-famous artist make a whole city happier – even those who didn’t go to the concerts? Taylor Swift's Eras Tour didn't just draw record crowds – it also made Stockholmers happier both before and after the concerts. This according to a new study about "Happyflation" from the Stockholm School of Economics.

A meta-analysis of field audits of gender gaps in application outcomes between 1976 and 2020 found that the discrimination of women for male-typed and balanced jobs decreased over time. Anna Dreber Almenberg and Magnus Johannesson, Professors at the Department of Economics at SSE, and co-authors publish a new article in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.

On August 28, the awards for the best tv programs and hosts in Sweden will be announced during Kristallengalan. One of the nominated programs, Viaplay Vinter, blends sports and research. Recurring guest on the program, researcher Gustav Almqvist, explains how an understanding of research can enhance the experience of sports.

In this policy brief, researchers Marcel Garz (Jönköping University) and Maiting Zhuang (SITE) illustrate the media's power to affect behavioural change, using the Swedish experience during Covid-19 as an example.

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.

Policy brief: The COVID-19 pandemic has drawn attention to a pre-existing threat to global health: the quality of air in cities around the world. Prolonged exposure to air pollution has been found to increase the mortality rate of COVID-19. This is a particular concern for much of Eastern Europe, where emissions regularly exceed safe levels.

Working paper: Can we improve the potential for information to induce individual climate-change curbing action by focusing on individual types? In this paper Maria Perrotta Berlin, Assistant Professor at SITE, and her co-author try to contribute to the understanding of the persistence and increase of meat eating in the face of mounting evidence on the ills of meat production and consumption by considering the role of selective attention and learning.

"The longer a person is unemployed, the greater the probability that the individual will not return to work at all. And even if we recover from the pandemic, it is not certain that those people will return", Jesper Roine explains the risk of longterm-unemployment in a recent interview in Dagens industri.

By Mark Bernard (with Jack Fanning and Sevgi Yuksel), Article in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization

by Chloé Le Coq (with Marieke Bos and Peter van Santen), Swedish House of Finance Research Paper