Working Papers 2013

All new research is first presented in a Working Paper (WP) where the target audience is primarily other researchers. All WPs from recent years are written in English. Since 2006 a Swedish summary is also included. A WP usually contains research that has come so far that it is ready to be submitted to a scientific journal for review and possible publication.


964. Risk Aversion Relates to Cognitive Ability: Fact or Fiction?

Ola Andersson, Jean-Robert Tyran, Erik Wengström and Håkan J. Holm

Recent experimental studies suggest that risk aversion is negatively related to cognitive ability. In this paper we report evidence that this relation might be spurious. We recruit a large subject pool drawn from the general Danish population for our…


963. Production Hierarchies in Sweden

Joacim Tåg

I study the internal organization of firms using occupation data on workers in Swedish manufacturing firms. Firms with more layers are larger in size, in value added, and they pay higher wages. Firms are hierarchal in that lower layers have more workers…


962. How to Combine High Sunk Costs of Exporting and Low Export Survival

Joakim Gullstrand and Maria Persson

In endeavouring to explain the empirical puzzle that the sunk costs of exporting are important, but that, at the same time, trade flows do not, on average, survive for very long, this paper explores the concepts of core and peripheral markets. First, it…


961. Using Lasso-Type Penalties to Model Time-Varying Covariate Effects in Panel Data Regressions – A Novel Approach Illustrated by the ‘Death of Distance’ in International Trade

Wolfgang Hess, Maria Persson, Stephanie Rubenbauer and Jan Gertheiss

When analyzing panel data using regression models, it is often reasonable to allow for time-varying covariate effects. We propose a novel approach to modelling timevarying coefficients in panel data regressions, which is based on penalized regression…


960. In the Shadow of the DSU: Addressing Specific Trade Concerns in the WTO SPS and TBT Committees

Henrik Horn, Petros C. Mavroidis and Erik N. Wijkström

The paper argues that focusing only on disputes formally raised in the WTO Dispute Settlement system underestimates the extent of trade conflict resolution within the WTO.  Both the SPS and TBT Committees address a significant number of…


959. Billionaire Entrepreneurs: A Systematic Analysis

Magnus Henrekson and Tino Sanandaji

The overwhelming majority of self-employed individuals are not entrepreneurial in the Schumpeterian sense. In order to unmistakably identify Schumpeterian entrepreneurs we focus on self-made billionaires (in USD) on Forbes Magazine’s list who became…


958. Globalization of Monitoring Practices: The Case of American Influences on the Dismissal Risk of European CEOs

Lars Oxelheim and Trond Randøy

This study examines globalization of monitoring practices by focusing on how American (U.S.) influences on European firms impact the dismissal risk for these firms' CEOs.  Specifically, we argue that the stronger short term orientation of the…


957. Heterogeneous Firms, Globalization and the Distance Puzzle

Mario Larch, Pehr-Johan Norbäck, Steffen Sirries and Dieter Urban

Despite the strong pace of globalization, the distance effect on trade is persistent or even growing over time (Disdier and Head, 2008). To solve this distance puzzle, we use the recently developed gravity equation estimator from Helpman, Melitz and…


956. Taxation of Goods and Services from 1862 to 2010

Mikael Stenkula

This paper presents annual Swedish time series data on consumption taxes, i.e. the indirect taxation of goods and services, between 1862 and 2010. As a share of total state tax revenues, consumption taxes were very high at the beginning of the period,…


955. Ethnic Diversity and Preferences for Redistribution: Reply

Matz Dahlberg, Karin Edmark and Helene Lundqvist

In a comment to Dahlberg, Edmark and Lundqvist (2012), Nekby and Pettersson-Lidbom (2012) argue (i) that the refugee placement program should be measured with contracted rather than actually placed refugees, and claim that the correlation between the two…


954. Hierarchies, the Small Firm Effect, and Entrepreneurship: Evidence from Swedish Microdata

Joacim Tåg, Thomas Åstebro and Peter Thompson

We explore whether the tendency for smaller firms to have fewer hierarchical layers explains the well-documented inverse correlation between firm size and the rate at which employees become business owners. Our analysis is based on a Swedish matched…


953. Market Specific News and Its Impact on Electricity Prices – Forward Premia

Ewa Lazarczyk

This paper studies the impact of market specific news on the short-time forward premia on the Scandinavian electricity market. I show that the short time premia between the day-ahead and intra-day electricity prices on the Scandinavian market can be…


952. Employment Protection and Parental Child Care

Martin Olsson

I examine if employment protection affects parental childcare. I find that a softer employment protection has a substantial effect on how parents use and divide paid childcare between them. The identification relies on a reform that made it easier for…


951. On the Internationalization of Corporate Boards

Lars Oxelheim, Aleksandra Gregorič, Trond Randøy and Steen Thomsen

Despite the global reach of their commercial activities, many multinational firms have proved slow in internationalizing their boards of directors. Based on a panel study of the internationalization of the boards of 347 non-financial firms from the Nordic…


950. Re-Coinage as a Monetary Tax: Conditions, Consequences and Comparisons with Debasement

Roger Svensson

Re-coinage implies that old coins are declared invalid and exchanged for new ones at fixed exchange rates and dates. Empirical evidence shows that re-coinage could occur as often as twice a year within a currency area in the Middle Ages. The exchange fee…


949. Competition and Antibiotics Prescription

Sara Fogelberg and Jonas Karlsson

The introduction of antibiotics as a medical treatment after World War II helped to dramatically increase life expectancy in the industrialized world. As a consequence of over-prescription the last decades have however seen a sharp increase in prevalence…


948. The Evolving Domain of Entrepreneurship Research

Bo Carlsson, Pontus Braunerhjelm, Maureen McKelvey, Christer Olofsson, Lars Persson and Håkan Ylinenpää

Research on entrepreneurship has flourished in recent years and is evolving rapidly. This paper explores the history of entrepreneurship research, how the research domain has evolved, and its current status as an academic field. The need to concretize…

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