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Sweden shifted to a calendar-aligned fiscal year in 1997; earlier years follow the pre-reform fiscal calendar but are recorded with a single year identifier. |\n| agency_id | Stable numeric identifier for each central government agency, used to track agencies over time. |\n| head_id | Identifier for the individual serving as agency head (Director General) in that year; constant for a person across years and agencies where applicable. |\n| agency_name | Official agency name as reported in government publications (often in Swedish). |\n| ministry_name | Name of the supervising ministry responsible for the agency in that year. |\n| ministry_code | Numeric code corresponding to the supervising ministry in that year. |\n| inflation | Annual price index factor used to express monetary amounts in constant prices; applied to convert nominal SEK to inflation-adjusted SEK for comparability over time. |\n| incumbent | Indicator for leadership continuity: 1 if the listed agency head is a holdover continuing in office that year; 0 if newly installed. |\n| conflict | Indicator of ideological misalignment: 1 if the cabinet that appointed the agency head belongs to a different ideological bloc than the parliamentary majority in that year; 0 if aligned. |\n| academic | Indicator that the agency head holds a PhD or comparable academic-sector credential that year (1) versus not (0). |\n| political | Indicator that the agency head has prior experience in political office/positions (1) versus not (0). |\n| private | Indicator that the agency head has work experience from the private sector (1) versus not (0). |\n| public | Indicator that the agency head has work experience from the public sector (1) versus not (0). |\n| council | Indicator that the agency had an advisory council in place that year (1) versus not (0). |\n| board | Indicator that the agency had a management board in place that year (1) versus not (0). |\n| creator | Indicator that the agency was originally established by a political bloc opposed to the current parliamentary majority (1) versus not (0). |\n| budget | Agency\u2019s annual operating appropriation in current (nominal) SEK as recorded in the national budget; excludes programmatic cash transfers. |\n| i_budget | Agency\u2019s operating appropriation expressed in constant (inflation-adjusted) SEK using the provided price index for intertemporal comparability. |\n| lni_budget | Natural logarithm of i_budget. |\n| bgrowth | Year-over-year percentage change in the agency\u2019s inflation-adjusted operating appropriation; may be missing for the first observed year of an agency or after structural breaks. |\n| bs_agency_id | Technical helper field mirroring the agency identifier; retained from the original processing pipeline. |\n| odd | Unlabeled technical field carried over from source files; not documented as substantively meaningful in this dataset version. |\n| lni_budget_control | Natural logarithm of the agency\u2019s inflation-adjusted operating appropriation in the previous fiscal year (lagged real budget). |\n\nDataset Context:\nThis dataset compiles annual records for Sweden\u2019s central executive agencies from 1971 to 2014, combining administrative registers and official publications. Agencies and their life spans were identified from the Swedish Code of Statutes, while annual operating appropriations and organizational details were taken from national budget bills, annexes, and government yearbooks such as the Swedish State Calendar. The resulting panel traces each agency\u2019s supervising ministry, leadership, organizational arrangements (e.g., advisory councils and management boards), and budget in both nominal and constant SEK.\n\nBudgets refer to operating appropriations rather than programmatic transfer spending, allowing like-for-like comparisons of agency running costs across time. Monetary amounts are deflated using an annual price index supplied with the data. A major public finance reform in the mid-1990s realigned Sweden\u2019s fiscal year to the calendar year starting in 1997; the dataset reflects the official year labels before and after this change.\n\nLeadership information centers on the Director General for each agency, including indicators of sectoral background (academic, political, private, public) and whether the leader is a continuing incumbent or newly installed. Swedish cabinet ministers appoint agency heads on fixed-term contracts, which\u2014together with legislative control over appropriations\u2014creates periods where leaders appointed under one political constellation continue to serve when the parliamentary majority shifts. The data also record whether agencies have advisory councils or management boards in a given year, institutional features that are regularly reported in official yearbooks.\n\nNot all agencies appear in every year: the panel includes agencies created, reorganized, or terminated over time. 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Chernozhukov et al. (2025, Section 11.3 Post\u2011Treatment Variables) emphasize: \u201cthe general message of this section is that explicitly adjusting for post-treatment variables is almost always a bad idea.\u201d They note over-control bias when \u201ca post-treatment variable \u2026 lies on a causal path from the treatment to the outcome\u201d and that \u201ccontrolling for a mediator \u2026 [yields] a controlled direct effect,\u201d not the total effect (Sec. 11.3; Figs. 11.9a\u2013b). They also warn against conditioning on outcomes or descendants of outcomes (Fig. 11.12) and against variables mechanically tied to treatment that can distort identification by adjustment. Applying these rules here:\n- budget, i_budget, lni_budget: contemporaneous budget levels are outcomes/mediators for bgrowth (which is defined from consecutive budgets); conditioning on them blocks part of the treatment effect (over-control, Sec. 11.3).\n- ministry_name, ministry_code: supervising ministry in a given year may be reassigned after turnover; these can be descendants of treatment (post\u2011treatment organizational channel), so conditioning risks blocking paths from conflict to budgets (Sec. 11.3).\n- head_id and incumbent: identity/holdover status in the post year can change because of the new government; these are post\u2011treatment and potentially mediating the effect (Sec. 11.3).\n- council, board: agency governance bodies \u201cin place that year\u201d can be created/removed by the incoming government; thus post\u2011treatment organizational features (Sec. 11.3).\n- creator: this variable is defined relative to the current parliamentary majority (\u201ccreated by a bloc opposed to the current parliamentary majority\u201d); because it is a mechanical function of the current majority\u2014the same shock that generates conflict\u2014it is affected by treatment status. Conditioning on it risks partialing out treatment variation and inducing post\u2011treatment bias (Sec. 11.3; avoid variables that are functions of treatment).\n- academic, political, private, public: these are the head\u2019s sectoral backgrounds measured in each year. When heads are replaced around turnover, these covariates become descendants of treatment in the post period, so adjusting for their post\u2011period values conditions on mediators (Sec. 11.3). If measured strictly pre\u2011treatment they are not post\u2011treatment, but in the two\u2011year DID windows they are recorded contemporaneously, so they should be excluded for causal identification of total effects.","reason_for_minimal_controlling_set":"No time\u2011varying covariate adjustment is required beyond agency and year fixed effects for the short 2\u00d72 DID comparisons. The paper\u2019s design explicitly relies on within\u2011agency changes around government turnover and absorbs confounders with fixed effects: \u201cNotice that the fixed effects cover a variety of potential confounders from the outset\u2026 we therefore adjust for any such constant differences between agencies and fiscal years by including one dummy variable for each agency and each fiscal year in the regression model.\u201d (Modeling strategy, p. 647). Treatment variation is plausibly exogenous because \u201cthe government\u2019s electoral cycle proceeds independently of the agency heads\u2019 employment contracts, [so] each fiscal year effectively carries a structure\u2011induced variation in the types of agencies that the parties in power must face\u201d (The Swedish case, p. 645), and \u201cthe uncertainty associated with ordinary democratic political competition should greatly assist with confounding control, as the range of factors that could plausibly cause a partisan shift in government is limited\u201d (The Swedish case, p. 646). Given these features and the two\u2011period windows (pre vs. post election), the minimal sufficient set for identification is none beyond group and time effects.","strategy":"Difference-in-Differences","time_variable":"year","treatments":["conflict"]},"identification_strategy":"Difference-in-Differences"},"headline_keys":{"infer.ols":["coef.treat_post"]},"naive":{"dataset":"ds_0006","treatment":"conflict","y":"bgrowth"},"native_id":"10","reference":{"cite":1,"note":"Reference path transcribed from the item's own estimation script.","steps":[{"args":{"cluster":"agency_id","controls":["treat","post"],"dataset":"ref_panel","x":["treat_post"],"y":"bgrowth"},"tool":"infer.ols","why":"smf.ols('bgrowth ~ treat * post'), cluster by agency_id"}]},"reference_path":{"calls":[{"args":{"cluster":"agency_id","controls":["treat","post"],"dataset":"ref_panel","x":["treat_post"],"y":"bgrowth"},"tool":"infer.ols"}],"needs":[],"provenance":"benchmark_script","quotes":{},"reference_datasets":["ref_c_post","ref_c_pre","ref_panel"],"source_id":"crb_papers.q010.script"}},"question":"By how many percentage points did year-over-year agency budget growth in 2007 differ for agencies that became ideologically misaligned versus those that stayed aligned across 2006-2007?","requires":[],"runner":null,"sources":["crb_papers.q010.gold","crb_papers.q010.script"],"split":"public","suite":"crb_papers","tags":["econ-bench","external","crb","did","ref_benchmark_script"],"target":"agent","tool":null,"truth":"CausalReasoningBenchmark gold at the pinned revision: causal_queries.json effect and standard_error (the value the item's estimation.py prints), scored as evaluate_result.py scores estimate_within_solution_ci"}