Publications

Is technology or trade driving increases in wage inequality? We propose that technology interacts with trade in the form of foreign direct investments to widen domestic wage inequality. We show that f…

I study how firms adapt to exogenous changes in labor costs induced by collective bargaining agreements. I use data on collective bargaining agreements in Sweden and study the impact of the nationwide…

Social trust is typically measured using surveys that ask people if they agree that most people can be trusted. A potential problem is that falling response rates plague these surveys. If non-response…

The application of machine learning (ML) to big data has become increasingly important. We propose a model where firms have access to the same ML, but incumbents have access to historical data. We sho…

This paper explores the impact of experience in foreign-owned firms on worker mobility, with a focus on Swedish companies acquired by foreign multinationals. We posit that international experience, by…

We study the impact of financing constraints on corporate risk management. Using data on credit scores matched with unique information on firm level commercial insurance purchases, we find that financ…

This paper examines how automation shapes intergenerational income mobility. Using Swedish  register data on parents and children from 1985 to 2019, we study how parental exposure to robots at th…

Developing countries have 1300+ investment treaties with developed countries. Investment treaties are often alleged to constrain developing country climate policies. This paper examines four treaty re…

This paper explores whether coups cause increased crisis risk, and if some types of coups are associated with stronger risk. I use a worldwide sample with data on more than 1200 onsets of economic cri…

Motivated by a recent setback in the fight against child malnutrition, this study explores whether aid projects help to reduce stunting, or impaired growth, among children in the local area. Focusing…

We highlight a new factor behind integration: tolerance in the immigrants’ background culture. We hypothesize that it is easier to partake of economic, civic-political, and social life in a new countr…

The Houtman-Maks index is a measure of the size of a violation of utility maximizing (i.e., rational) behavior. This note introduces the Stata command hmindex, which calculates the Houtman-Maks index…

In a representative democracy politicians should either implement policies that voters want or policies that politicians believe are in voters long-term interest, even if voters currently oppose them.…

The creation and scaling of startups are inherently linked to risk-taking, with various types of owners handling these risks differently. This paper investigates the influence of an active venture cap…

Many governments introduced temporary adjustments to counter the economic and health consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. We study the importance of already existing government transfers and pandemi…

An increasing number of researchers, whether in Sweden, Slovakia, Italy, Japan, Brazil, or many other places, are using English in their discourse, written or oral, despite working in a place where th…

Based on a review of 700+ peer-reviewed articles since 1990, identified using text mining methodology and supervised machine learning, we analyze how neo-Schumpeterian growth theorists relate to the e…

We present estimates of the number of refugees expected to flee Ukraine and to which countries they are expected to migrate based on migration preferences data from the Gallup World Poll. This is impo…

Chinese investment abroad has grown significantly in connection with the Belt and Road Initiative. This article tries to answer two questions: first, what considerations gave birth to the BRI? And sec…

The European Commission’s Directive on minimum wages aims to ensure an adequate minimum wage for all workers in the Union and thereby counteract poverty among the low paid. This article examines the u…

In this paper, we study the link between globalization of firms and gender inequality. Specifically, we examine how the need for interpersonal contacts in trade and gender-specific differences in nego…

Much political conflict in the world revolves around the issue of how much freedom to accord people. Liberal democracies are characterized by, e.g., the rule of law and a strong protection of civil ri…

We study the mental health of PhD students in Sweden using comprehensive administrative data on prescriptions, specialist care visits, hospitalizations, and causes of death. We find that about 7% (5%)…

This study presents an improvement of the King-Fullerton framework for calculating the marginal effective tax rate (METR) for active owners of closely held corporations in a dual income tax system wit…

In this paper, we study foreign ownership as a vehicle for transferring gender norms across international borders. Specifically, we analyze how the wage differential between men and women in Swedish f…

This essay argues that the most crucial institution of any school system is the embraced view of knowledge—from which virtually all other aspects of a school are derived: the content of its curricula,…

We investigate the effect of technology adoption on competition by leveraging aunique dataset on production, costs, and asset characteristics for North Sea upstream oil & gas companies. Relying on…

The mixed-demand model allows for very flexible specification of what should be considered endogenous and exogenous in demand system estimation. This paper introduces a revealed preference framework t…

The institutional literature suggests that long-term tax incentives are crucial for entrepreneurs, but studies on this topic are hampered by theoretical and empirical problems related to how to define…

We analyze changes in the willingness to substitute from prescribed pharmaceuticals to more affordable generic equivalents in response to the first experience with a substitution. Using Swedish indivi…

We develop a novel measure of job-worker allocation quality (JAQ) by exploiting employer-employee data with machine learning techniques. Based on our measure, the quality of job-worker matching correl…

Formal institutions, e.g., regulations, are considered crucial determinants of entrepreneurship, but what enables regulatory change when there is a regulatory void, meaning entrepreneurship clashes wi…

We study shareholder support for corporate board nominees before and after the 2018 California gender quota. Pre-quota, new female nominees received greater support than new male nominees, consistent…

In this paper, we study the role of risk-sharing in entrepreneurship-driven innovation. Studying entrepreneurship and innovation entails modeling an occupational choice and an effort choice. Risk-shar…

Ideological spillovers refer to the modification of an individual’s core beliefs after learning about other people's beliefs.  We study one specific international ideological spillover, namely, the ef…

This study evaluates the impact of conventional cage bans for laying hens in the EU on exports of poultry-keeping equipment. Using detailed data on international trade in poultry-keeping equipment com…

We use population administrative data from Sweden to study adherence to 63 medication-related guidelines. We compare the adherence of patients without personal access to medical expertise to the adher…

We study whether the onset of the COVID-19 crisis affected the program choices of high school applicants in Sweden. Our analysis exploits the fact that the admission process consists of two stages: a…

Ceding ownership to outside investors provides a control dilemma for founders. In less developed capital markets with weaker formal institutions, we argue that retained founder director ownership can…

In this paper, we study a new channel to explain firms’ price-setting behavior. We propose that uncertainty about factor prices has a positive effect on markups. We show theoretically that firms with…

This paper investigates the explanatory power of social convention theory for explaining the persistence of female genital cutting (FGC) in a broad sample of African countries. While influential in po…

While there is almost unanimous consent among scientists that climate change is real and has detrimental consequences, there is a sizable number of people who are skeptical towards these propositions…

In this study, we derive a poverty-minimizing allocation rule, based on which we assess the poverty-efficiency of actual aid allocations, with a special focus on the comparative impact of new donors a…

This paper examines how changes in product market concentration, specifically firm exit, affect prices. I develop a model where firms have variable markups to show that the remaining firms increase th…

We analyze optimal redistribution in the presence of labor market signaling where innate productive ability is not only unobserved by the government, but also by prospective employers. Our model featu…

I evaluate the effect of the 2011 Swedish electricity market splitting reform on the allocation of wind power, exploiting a unique data set of all Swedish applications for wind power since 2003. By co…

This paper analyzes new evidence on long-run trends in aggregate wealth accumulation and wealth inequality in Western countries. The new findings suggest that wealth-income ratios were lower before Wo…

Amidst considerable debate on the relationship between entrepreneurship and economic inequality, scholarship only indirectly addresses how entrepreneurship informs individuals’ relative well-being. We…

Innovation often takes place in entrepreneurial ecosystems. We use the history of the Silicon Valley venture capital model and the Hollywood motion picture industry to illustrate how specialized insti…

Research indicates that education quality – measured by test scores in international student surveys – predicts economic growth. In this paper, we extend previous findings up to 2016 and analyse test…

In this paper, we analyze the effect of transport infrastructure investments in railways. As a testing ground, we use data from a new historical database that includes annual panel data on approximate…

Among contemporary economists, Mariana Mazzucato stands out for her emphasis on the importance of innovation to solve pressing challenges and achieve a greater quality of life. However, the type of mi…

The issue of what explains differences in the wealth of nations is one of the most classic in economics. We propose de facto academic freedom as an explanatory variable. The main idea is that such fre…

Based on historical analogies, we emphasize a connection between financial crises and technological shifts where the shift calls for a structural economic transformation. We discuss how political pres…

William J. Baumol was one of the most prolific economists of his generation, analyzing a broad range of central economic issues addressing real problems of the world. In this essay, we present and cri…

Water is an increasingly scarce resource. It is often distributed such that consumers do not face any marginal cost of consumption, creating a common pool problem. For instance, tenants in multi-famil…

This paper aims to find country-level factors that explain the rise of populist parties in European democracies. While populism is often connected to inequality, we note that right-wing populist parti…

Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) can benefit host countries by facilitating access to sophisticated technologies, good management and global value chains. However, multinational firms have many alterna…

All organizations need to allocate labor to production and administration. In many cases – particularly within the public sector – the optimal allocation is far from obvious. Indeed, vocal concerns ha…

We study the causal effects of previous experience and language skills when newly arrived refugees in Sweden apply for job openings by means of a field experiment. Applications were sent from randomly…

We use tax-register data on all firms in Sweden to document the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on firm sales, tax payments, and sick pay. The pandemic impact is identified using within-year, between-…

We measure the distributional impact of the COVID-19 pandemic using newly released population register data in Sweden. Monthly earnings inequality increased during the pandemic, and the key driver is…

Differentiating various types of entrepreneurs provides clues to the puzzle of why top-down policies often fail to create Schumpeterian entrepreneurship and the ecosystems where it thrives. Schumpeter…

This paper develops a framework for analyzing the incentives of national transmission system operators (TSOs) to supply cross-border interconnection capacity in an international electricity market. Ou…

We study competition between political parties in repeated elections with probabilistic voting, allowing a multidimensional policy space and multiple political parties. This model entails multiple equ…

This paper presents a critical assessment of the public debate on income and wealth inequality in Sweden. We scrutinize ten often-heard claims in the debate by contrasting them against facts in availa…

Motivated by the lack of sub-national empirical evidence on the relationship between aid and institutional development, this study explores the local effects of World Bank aid on perceived institution…

We study mechanism design under endogenously incomplete commitment as it arises in contracting with escape clauses. An escape clause permits the agent to end a contractual relationship under specified…

This essay argues that mainstream Left and Right parties’ convergence around the liberal moral foundations of care, fairness, and liberty most likely explains the popular discontent with establishment…

There is scant systematic empirical evidence on what explains variation in academic freedom. Making use of a new indicator and panel data covering 64 countries 1960–2017, we investigate how de facto a…

Many electricity markets use capacity mechanisms to support generation owners. Capacity payments can mitigate imperfections associated with “missing money” in the spot market and solve transitory capa…

We study how changes in competition from entry regulations impact stores’ incentives to adjust product variety. Using Swedish data, we estimate a dynamic model of endogenous product offerings where st…

In the wake of the Covid-19 crisis, the European Union must regain lost ground and create more favorable conditions for inclusive and sustainable economic growth. The best way to achieve this goal is…

Sweden faces a major challenge in the next decades because of a projected increase in electricity demand, aging supply infrastructure and the transition to an energy system with a substantial share of…

We construct an oligopolistic model with heterogeneous firms where new automation technologies displace workers. We show that both leading and laggard firms increase their productivity when automating…

Relying on Swedish linked employer-employee data over a 30-year period, I study the importance of work during high school for graduates’ school-to-work transition and labor market outcomes. I show tha…

For the past decade, the sharing economy has not only grown but also expanded to cover a wide variety of different activities across the globe. Despite a lot of research, there is still no agreement o…

This paper studies the behavior of competing firms in a duopoly with rational inattentive consumers. Firms play a sequential game in which they decide to obfuscate their individual prices before compe…

We show that the anticipation of COVID-19 vaccines reduces voluntary social distancing. In a large-scale preregistered survey experiment with a representative sample, we study whether providing inform…

We study the economic and psychological effects of a USD 1076 PPP unconditional cash transfer, a five-week psychotherapy program, and the combination of both interventions among 5,756 individuals in r…

It is well known that capital constraints can hinder individuals to set up a business. Many business owners rely on own capital or capital from friends, fools and family in order to acquire required c…

Thirty years ago, the Swedish tax system underwent a major reform. Since then there have been many changes to the tax system, and the general level of tax revenues has declined by over five percentage…

Several studies have linked rising insolvency rates to increasing inequality and argued that this might be explained by individuals’ desire to “Keep up with the Joneses”. Using unique administrative r…

This study investigates the role of retail pharmacy ownership in the opioid epidemic in the United States by comparing independently owned pharmacies’ and chain pharmacies’ prescription opioid dispens…

This paper evaluates an ambitious and newly designed program for increased integration in Sweden. The purpose of the program is to help newly arrived, low-educated refugees into employment. The progra…

This paper provides a comprehensive study on how attending a Swedish independent upper secondary school, instead of a public school, affects students’ academic and short-term post-secondary outcomes.…

Motivated by agency theory and arguments from linguistic studies, we argue in this paper the internationalization of a firm’s audit committee to be associated with weaker firm-level corporate governan…

In this paper, we use a randomized field experiment in Sweden to investigate how self-employment experience is valued in the labor market. We find that self-employment experience negatively impacts th…

Intrapreneurs, entrepreneurial employees, constitute an important force behind innovations in the economy. Yet, what factors that promote intrapreneurship at the country level are an underdeveloped re…

Researchers increasingly recognize that entrepreneurial employees, intrapreneurs, play a critical role in innovation. As with regular entrepreneurship, however, the value of intrapreneurial activity d…

This article estimates a dynamic structural model of firm R&D investment in twelve Swedish manufacturing industries and uses it to measure rates of return to R&D and to simulate the impact of…

This study investigates whether exposure to peer depression in adolescence affects own depression in adulthood. We find a significant long-term depression peer effect for females but not for males in…

We develop a theoretical model in which technology adoption decisions are based on the information received from others about the quality of a new technology and on their risk attitudes. We test…

Economic theory predicts that outsourcing public services to private firms will reduce costs, but the effect on quality is ambiguous. We explore quality differences between publicly and privately owne…

We use the random allocation of graders to different exam questions at Stockholm University to evaluate the existence of same-sex bias in exam correction. We find evidence of same-sex bias before anon…

We study ethnic differences in long-term self-employment in Sweden combining population-wide register data and a unique survey targeting a large representative sample of the total population of long-t…

This is a study of the relationship between business group ownership and constituent firms’ adoption of Anglo-American shareholder value governance in African firms at the undertaking of an initial pu…

We study the role of capital requirement in immigrants’ self-employment decision with the help of a reform implemented in Sweden in 2010 which reduced capital requirements for limited liability compan…

Recent experimental evidence suggests that noisy behavior correlates strongly with personal characteristics. Since decision noise leads to bias in most elicitation tasks, there is a risk of falsely in…

We examine how variation in antisemitism across countries can be explained by economic freedom. We propose two mechanisms. First, the more economic freedom, the greater the scope of market activities.…