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The national curriculum for Swedish schools is an expression of “postmodern constructivist understanding of what knowledge is". This undermines genuine knowledge, explained Magnus Henrekson, IFN, in Swedish Public Radio (Studio ett). Children of immigrant parents had done better in the traditional school, he believes. Henrekson is interviewed and explains that immigrant families who are not perfect in the Swedish language are left without guidance. In fact, students are expected to analyze, evaluate and compare without first having sufficient knowledge skills.

Professor Alexander Ljungqvist, affiliated to IFN, has been appointed to the Stefan Persson Family Chair in Entrepreneurial Finance at the Stockholm School of Economics. Ljungqvist has previously in cooperation with several IFN researchers been studying among other things the importance of the stock market for the industry. He most recently held the Ira Rennert Chair in Finance and Entrepreneurship at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He has taught at universities world wide, including Oxford University and Harvard Business School. Ljungqvist has served on the Nasdaq Listing Council and one a council of experts on behalf of the World Economic Forum.

Even if service companies grow rapidly and dominate modern economies, there is barely any knowledge of their productivity. In an article in Ekonomisk Debatt Matilda Orth, IFN, and Florin Maican, affiliated to IFN, present new methods for analyzing productivity in service companies where investment in new technology is key. They have investigated the extent to which supermarket establishments and the level of regulation of new stores, affect the productivity and closure of existing stores as well as the supply for consumers. Among other things, they find that consumers in large municipalities are winners when new stores open up.

Union membership is going down due to changed behavior among workers rather than structural changes on the labor market, explains the Swedish Labour Policy Council (AER) in a new report. "The rate of unionization has sunk with 16 percent", said Lars Calmfors, IFN and chair of AER. The council points to Germany as a warning example. In Germany the unionization has fallen with almost 30 percent during the last three decades. It shows that change can come rapidly [in Sweden too], said Calmfors.

Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research has a new updated website. The award is unique in its kind with its price sum of a 100 000 euro and a global focus. The award is given by the Swedish Entrepreneurship Forum and the Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN). Vinnova is co-financier and the price sum comes from Stockholms Köpmansklubb.

IFN is seeking two research assistants for two months in the summer of 2018. To a large extent the daily work will entail the day-to-day work of a researcher. The chores varies: compiling literature, compiling data for data bases, or working with STATA, i.e coding for proper analysis of given data. Preferably you should have completed your master in Economics or be at the very end of the master program. You ought to be interested in research with relevance for the Industry and have the ambition to continue to a Ph.D. program in the future.

Andreas Bergh and Mårten Blix, IFN are two of the authors to the anthology Money for Nothing – Essays on Basic Income (Timbro, 2018) “The welfare state […] is based on the theory that if you can work and support yourself you should do so,” writes Bergh. Mårten Blix, has calculated the cost of introducing a basic income/salary. “If all of Sweden’s around 10 million inhabitants would be given a monthly basic income of SEK 12 000 after tax  it would be equivalent to [….] 33 percent of GDP. This shouldf be compared to the total expenses in the public sector that amounted to around 50 percent of the GDP in 2016.”

Niclas Berggren, Henrik Jordahl, IFN and Panu Poutvaara are the authors of the study “The right look: Conservative politicians look better and voters reward it” that was recently published in the peer reviewed research magazine Journal of Public Economics. The article is the most downloaded article the last 90 days. It is also the article that has had the largest penetration in social media. For example, it has rendered 700 comments on Facebook. The article “Taxation of Swedish Firm Owners: The Great Reversal from 1970s to 2010s” by Magnus Henrekson, IFN, has been publicized in the Nordic Tax Journal and awarded with a honorable mention in 2017 by the paper’s editorial committee.

A guest column in Svenska Dagbladet by Henrik Jordahl has received considerable attention, including an unusually large amount of readers’comments. Most of them writing that they appreciate his critique of the government’s suggestion to introduce a limit on profit in the welfare sector. Henrik Jordahl explains that he wrote the article being “upset with the government that for the exercise of political power has decided to go along with a suggestion that is so obviously inferior”. In the article he describes how the government encourages larger cooperation to buy properties and to do financial number twisting to circumvent the consequences of this regulatory proposal. Henrik Jordahl argues that the government thereby creates a damaging “profit hunt”, the very same they claim to be working against.

Daniel Waldenström, IFN, chairman of the SNS Economic Policy Council, presented the 2018 Council Report at a seminar January 19. Co-authors have been Åsa Hansson, Associate Professor, Lund University.and Spencer Bastani, Associate Professor, Linnæus University. The Researchers suggest that the tax on income should be lowered but that the tax on capital should be higher. “Our suggestions to not alter the total burden of taxation” said Daniel Waldenström when the report was presented at SNS.

Lars Calmfors, IFN, has been appointed by the Norwegian Government to to be part of an expert group to study the labor market. The chairman of the group is Professor Steinar Holden. "Compared with other Nordic countries, Norway has had a rather poor development in terms of employment rates," explains Lars Calmfors. Employment has fallen in recent years, especially among men and youth, explains the Norwegian government in a press release. "It is important that we get facts on the table and that experts review what we know about what works and does not work in the labor market," says Labor and Social Affairs Minister Anniken Hauglie.

At the end of last year an articles by Per Hjertstrand, Pehr-Johan Norbäck, Lars Persson, IFN, et al was published at Vox, CEPR's policy portal. The researchers have looked into the fact that most developed economies provide significant subsidies to small businesses. The reason being to encourage innovation. In the Vox-article the researchers argue that while subsidies to reduce entry costs may increase entrepreneurial entry, they can also lead to a reduction in the likelihood of ‘breakthrough’ inventions.

In a new working paper Martin Andersson (affiliated to IFN), Johan P Larsson and Özge Öner (IFN) have studied how self-employment among immigrants from the Middle East is influenced by residency in an ethnic enclave. The researchers show a robust tendency for people to leave non-employment for entrepreneurship if many members of the local diaspora are business owners. Immigrants appear to be significantly less stimulated by people that are not ethnic peers. Though, it appears that it is not the scale, but the quality of local ethnic enclaves that above all influence labor market outcomes for immigrants.

Every year IFN arranges a series of seminars open to the public. Topics for these are chosen from IFN's fields of research. During 2017, most of the seminars have been filmed, and four out of six seminars were in English. Having some free time during the holidays? If so, you might be interested in watching one of these recordings.

A second report on integration should probably also be written, said Andreas Bergh, IFN and Lund University, when commenting on the ESO report Inspiration for Integration, by Patrick Joyce, Ratio. The report compares integration policies in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands and Germany. Joyce stated that Germany is the country that has been most successful to integrate immigrants in the labor market, in the short and long term. But, Andreas Bergh said, it would have been better to discuss the labor market in Britain, the United States, Canada and New Zealand. He explained that these countries could better serve as sources of inspiration. Among other things, earned income tax credit can be an alternative to subsidies to employers to hire new arrivals.
 

A minor change in market trading rules could save taxpayers billions of dollars. This is the conclusion that Pär Holmberg, IFN, draws from his research in a blog post at LSE Business Review. Holmberg argues that when ties occur at low offer prices, higher priority should be given to sell orders with a large volume. "The cost to implement the new pro-competitive rule would be negligible compared to the savings, when the turnover is high" Holmberg writes.

Brussels | Magnus Henrekson, IFN, presented the report Institutional Reform for Innovation and Entrepreneurship: An Agenda for Europe (Project Fires) at a seminar hosted by the Permanent Representation of Sweden to the EU and jointly organized by the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise and IFN. The study calls for more productive entrepreneurship to improve the quality of life of EU citizens, and for the EU to enhance the competitiveness in the global marketplace. The panel agreed that the same recipe doesn't apply to all member states. Though, Gunnar Hökmark, MEP (M), argued that some things fit all member states, for example less regulation and more openness for competion.

Edward Lazear of Stanford University visited IFN on Wednesday and launched a public seminar. Lazear has studied immigration to the United States, as well as to Sweden, and found that the underlying mechanisms are much the same in both countries. He explained that the success of the new arrivals is more dependent on the rules set by the recipient country than the country from which new arrivals have come. If integration is defined as immigrants learning the language of the new country, those immigrants living in areas with many people from their old home country are integrated, into society as a whole, at a much lower rate.

Mårten Blix, IFN, explains in a new pod how come that he studies the effects of digitization on public finances. He compares the digitization with electrification and says that the big difference to previous technology leaps is the speed with which the digital reality comes to us. The one who is interested in the development and who keeps up with progress will benefit, he says, explaining that it is primarily not jobs as such that disappear with technical progress but the content in jobs.

Has expanding trade between the U.S. and China contributed to the polarization of U.S. politics? Analyzing outcomes from the 2002 and 2010 congressional elections, Kaveh Majlesi, Lund University and affiliated to IFN, along with David Autor, David Dorn and Gordon Hanson have detected an ideological realignment in trade-exposed local labor markets that commences prior to the 2016 U.S. presidential election.