News

Fredrik Sjöholm, CEO of IFN, has been elected to be a member of the board of the European Institute of Japanese Studies.

How should the EU act to create more sustainable entrepreneurship? That is the main question in the book The Entrepreneurial Society: A Reform Strategy for the European Union, written by Niklas Elert and Magnus Henrekson, IFN, and Mark Sanders, Utrecht University. The authors are proposing reforms in six different areas to create more sustainable entrepreneurship in the EU.

Per Skedinger, IFN, is one of the authors of a new report commissioned by the Nordic Council of Ministers/ Nordregio.

Södertörn University has affiliated professor Pehr-Johan Norbäck, IFN, to its economics department.

Daniel Waldenström, IFN, is one of the participants in this year's SNS Tylösand Summit: Economic policy in the covid world and beyond.

Game theory models to explain acquisitions, measures of automation, and a greenness index. These are three areas that this year’s summer assistants at IFN have worked with and that have given them new insights on economic research to take with them to further studies during the fall.

Özge Öner, IFN and University of Cambridge, and her co-author Maria Abreu, University of Cambridge, are awarded the Ashby Prize for their paper "Disentangling the Brexit vote: The role of economic, social and cultural contexts in explaining the UK's EU referendum vote".

Bitcoin is neither money, a financial asset nor digital gold. Instead, it should be seen as an open Ponzi scheme, argue Roger Svensson, IFN , and Bob Seeman, the authors of the new book Bitcoin: Unlicensed Gambling.

Bitcoin lacks a solid foundation as an international currency, writes Roger Svensson, IFN, in an opinion piece in Financial Times.

There has been a shift in economic activity and away from young firms toward large, mature ”superstar” firms, said professor John Haltiwanger in his prize lecture when he received the Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research.

Digitization, migration, and the Covid crisis have brought on a rapid change in the Swedish business sector. To better respond to the need for high-quality analysis of the various factors relevant to the function of the business sector, IFN is developing two of its research programs.

IFN researcher Henrik Horn's paper  ”International Jurisdiction over Standard-Essential Patents” is nominated for the Antitrust Writing Awards 2021.  The Award is issued by Concurrence and George Washington University. The paper is nominated within the category Intellectual Property and is one of ten nominated papers.

Niclas Berggren, IFN, has been appointed a member of the Editorial Board for the journal Public Choice.

The new book Privatizing Welfare Services: Lessons from the Swedish Experiment, by IFN researchers Mårten Blix and Henrik Jordahl, is reviewed by professor Diane Coyle in her blog The Enlightened Economist.

Matilda Orth, IFN, and Florin Maican, affiliated to the IFN, have written a column on the dynamic impact of exporting on firm R&D investment in Vox EU. Together with their co-authors Mark Roberts, Pennsylvania State University, and Van Anh Vuong, Maastricht University, they use a structural framework to estimate the returns to innovation investments and analyze the impact of trade of those returns.

One of their conclusions is that the long payoff to R&D investment is higher for firms that are active and operate more intensively in export markets.

Read their column here

Today Fredrik Sjöholm starts his new position as CEO of IFN. He succeeds Magnus Henrekson, who has been the CEO for the past 15 years. Fredrik Sjöholm is recruited from Lund University, where he held a position as a Professor of International Economics.

The Research Institute of Industrial Economics, IFN, was founded in 1939. It grew into Sweden's largest institute for applied economic research on issues relevant to trade and industry. Fourteen years ago, IFN started a project documenting its' history. One of the books written as a part of this project was Anders Johnson's Building Bridges and challenging conventions: IFN 1939 – 2012. The book has been revised by author and journalist Elisabeth Precht, former Communications officer at  IFN. The new book describes the years from 2012 to 2020.

Male same-sex couples are being discriminated against on the Portuguese rental market. This is shown by IFN researchers Niclas Berggren and Therese Nilsson and their co-author Filipe Gouveia in an article recently accepted for publication in the Journal of Housing Economics. The study has impacted Portugal: One of the Portuguese Parliament parties is bringing a discussion point to the national parliament on discrimination in the housing market, using the study to validate further the need to discuss the subject.

The researchers are conducting a field experiment on the rental markets in Lisbon and Porto. Read the study here.