Publications

We investigate the effect of employment protection legislation (EPL) on the propensity to hire workers from unemployment and active labor market programs (ALMPs), utilizing a reform that decreased dis…

We analyze the relationship between residence in an ethnic enclave and immigrants’ labor market integration with respect to finding a first job in the receiving country. The analysis distinguishes bet…

In part I of this paper, we proposed a Mixed-Integer Linear Program (MILP) to analyze imperfect competition of oligopoly producers in two-stage zonal power markets. In part II of this paper, we propos…

This paper is part I of a two-part paper. It proposes a two-stage game to analyze imperfect competition of producers in zonal power markets with a day-ahead and a real-time market. We consider strateg…

The idea that all types of economic freedom – including limited government – promote prosperity is challenged by the fact that some countries successfully combine a large public sector with high taxes…

The relevance of residential segregation and ethnic enclaves for labor market sorting of immigrants has been investigated by a large body of literature. Previous literature presents competing argument…

International investment agreements have become increasingly controversial. The agreements are alleged to be beset with a large number of  deficiencies that harm host countries in particular. For inst…

Globalization affects the mix of jobs available in an economy and the rate at which workers gain skills. We develop a model in which firms differ in terms of productivity and workers differ in skills,…

International investment agreements typically permit foreign investors to litigate against host countries (Investor-State Dispute Settlement, ISDS). Yet, common criticism holds that host countries wou…

This paper studies the determinants of economies of scope and quantifies their impact on the extensive and intensive product margins in retail. We use a framework based on a multiproduct technology to…

Many currencies, especially those of countries with negative net foreign assets, tend to depreciate during times of financial turbulence. Using a panel of 26 currencies over the period 1/1997 – 6/2016…

It has been argued that the Swedish tax system has favored firm control through industrial foundations, which should have inhibited entrepreneurship and economic growth. However, research has been ham…

This paper studies the location decisions of Swedish start-up independent schools. It makes use of the great expansion of independent schools following a reform implemented in 1992 to test what local…

Our paper presents an empirical analysis of entrepreneurial well-being using a large-scale longitudinal household survey from the UK that tracks almost 50,000 individuals across seven waves over the p…

The world’s first multinational electricity market was formed with the creation of the Nordic power exchange, Nord Pool. We analyze the incentives to undertake transmission network investment in the c…

We present results from a unique nationwide survey conducted in Sweden on sexual orientation and job satisfaction. Our results show that gay men, on average, seem more satisfied with their job than he…

We study to what degree authors who publish in the five most prestigious journals in economics have previously published there and in which world region they are based. Although still high, the concen…

Government debt is high in most developed countries, and while it may reflect short-term attempts to kick-start the economy in times of crisis through fiscal stimulus, the longer-term consequences ris…

Sweden combines a vibrant market economy with a large public sector. This combination of public and private also characterizes the country’s comprehensive tax-financed welfare services. More than one-…

We study the political effects of mass emigration to the United States in the 19th century using data from Sweden. To instrument for total emigration over several decades, we exploit severe local fros…

The poor performance of credit ratings of structured finance products in the financial crisis has prompted investigation into the role of credit rating agencies (CRAs) in designing and marketing these…

We present a study of immigrant self-employment in Sweden using the recent matched employer-employee data from 2014. We find large variations in self-employment rates among immigrant groups as well as…

More than 50 years after independence, the majority of countries in Sub-Saharan Africa remain poor with limited rates of economic growth. One of the most striking features of economic development on t…

Throughout history and across countries, women appear more likely than men to enter politics at the heels of a close relative or spouse. We provide a theoretical explanation for this dynastic bias in…

This paper studies customer discrimination against fictive male and female food truck owners with Arabic names on a Swedish University campus using a web-based experiment. Students at a Swedish univer…

The aim of this paper is to provide new empirical evidence on the most crucial determinants of success for firms applying for public R&D grants. Previous studies have been limited to firm level da…

The media often cast foreign private equity firms as villains who gamble with local jobs. We use detailed registry data from Sweden to show that foreign buyouts have not affected workers' labor market…

This paper compares life satisfaction among the elderly (61 years of age or older) who are self-employed, wage-employed or out of the labour force in Sweden with the help of a unique survey. Sweden is…

The Swedish school system suffers from profound problems with teacher recruitment and retention, knowledge decline, and grade inflation. Absenteeism is high, and psychiatric disorders have risen sharp…

The purpose of this study is to measure the sensitivity of traded quantities and trade unit values to agricultural production shocks. We develop a general equilibrium model of trade in which productio…

In this paper, we first present novel evidence of grading bias against women at the university level. This is in contrast to previous results at the secondary education level. Contrary to the gender c…

This paper explores the dynamics of press freedom around events that threaten or oust the incumbent regime of a country. While democracies on average grant the press more freedom, our theoretical star…

Using data on all Swedish computing startups founded 2007–2015, we find a systematic positive relationship between the propensity of a computing firm to reach customers globally via digital platforms…

We evaluate the impact on earnings, pensions, and further labor market outcomes of two parallel educational reforms increasing instructional time in Swedish primary school. The reforms extended the an…

We argue that scholars in the Austrian tradition of economics should incorporate the notion of a collaborative innovation bloc into their study of spontaneous market order. We demonstrate how successf…

Using detailed census data covering over 40,000 farms in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, Canada, we document the vast and increasing farm size heterogeneity, and analyze the role of farm size in a…

We surveyed a large sample of Swedish lottery players about their psychological well-being and analyzed the data following pre-registered procedures. Relative to matched controls, large-prize winners…

The dispute settlement mechanism (DSM) is today the most active dispute resolution forum in the world. However, its success has also led to increased processing time of disputes, which, in turn, incre…

We provide empirical evidence that uncertainty (rather than risk) and optimism are distinctive characteristics of high-impact entrepreneurial firms (recently listed firms) relative to old, incumbent f…

In Sweden, a trust-based system of school performance evaluation meets a market-oriented school system with liberal entry conditions for voucher-funded private providers. National standardized tests a…

The basic principle governing the development of the accounting framework is the choice of appropriate comparators. Firstly, when measuring contributions to job creation, we should focus on just job c…

The current study provides the first experimental test of the compromise effect, i.e. the tendency to choose middle options, in a naturally occurring setting. Simultaneously, I propose and evaluate a…

The paper reports the first experimental study on people’s fairness views on extreme income inequalities arising from winner-take-all reward structures. We find that the majority of participants consi…

We study a reform by which a standardized model of choice and competition was introduced in tax-financed home care in a majority of Swedish municipalities. The market for home care is of particular in…

We measure labor productivity in home care using new data from the recent introduction of digital time measurement in Swedish municipalities. By measuring worker utilization (delivered hours as a shar…

Zonal pricing with countertrading (a market-based redispatch) gives arbitrage opportunities to the power producers located in the export-constrained nodes. They can increase their profit by increasing…

Policymakers in several countries have recently taken steps to promote the rapid export expansion of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The goal of these policies has been to create successfu…

Market power in electricity wholesale markets arises when generators have incentives to mark up their offers above the cost of production. I model a transmission network with a single line. I derive o…

Competition between oligopolist electricity generators is inhibited by transmission constraints. I present a supply function equilibrium (SFE) model of an electricity market with a single lossless, bu…

Earning forecasts disclosed by financial analysts are known to be overly optimistic. Since an investor relies on their expertise, the question arises whether he would take analyst recommendations at f…

This paper asks to what extent life satisfaction among immigrants remains similar to that in their country of origin and to what extent it adapts to that in their country of residence. We employ data…

This paper reports results from a classroom dictator game comparing the effects of three different sets of standard instructions. As was shown by Oxobyand Spraggon (2008), inducing a feeling of entitl…

In Sweden, as in many other countries, marginal groups tend to be overrepresented in non-standard employment. A decomposition of the employment rate of full-time workers on permanent contracts reveals…

In this paper, we introduce a special issue of Small Business Economics on Financial and Institutional Reforms for an Entrepreneurial Society in Europe. There are many reasons for Europe to want to ma…

While entrepreneurship researchers agree that institutions ‘matter’ for entrepreneurship, they also have a rather encompassing understanding of institutions as almost any external factor that influenc…

The privatization of state owned enterprises is on the agenda across the globe. Using Swedish data covering two decades, we show that productivity gains and headcount reductions are coupled with econo…

Little is known about self-employment as a career choice for women who marry a highincome spouse. We show that Swedish women who are married to a high-income spouse are, on average, highly educated an…

Private equity firms (PE firms) have become common owners of established firms in concentrated markets. We show that the threat of a PE acquisition can trigger incumbent mergers in an otherwise merger…

This paper employs Swedish data containing security level information on households' stock holdings to investigate how consumption responds to changes in stock market returns. We exploit households’ p…

Since the early 1980s a wave of liberalizing reforms has swept over the world. While the stated motivation for these reforms has usually been to increase economic efficiency, some critics have instead…

We provide stylized facts on the existence and dynamics over time of the large firm wage premium for four countries. We examine matched employer-employee micro-data from Brazil, Germany, Sweden, and t…

We employ geocoded data to explore the effects of ethnic enclaves in Swedish cities on the propensity of Middle Eastern immigrants to use business ownership as a vehicle to transcend from labor market…

This paper starts with the observation that almost all military dictatorships that democratize become presidential democracies. I hypothesize that military interests are able to coordinate on status-p…

We construct a model of strategic behavior in sequential markets which exhibits a persistent forward price premium. On the spot market, producers wield market power while purchasers are price takers. …

This paper studies social-tie formation when individuals care about the geographical location of other individuals. In our model, the intensity of social interactions can be chosen at the same time as…

Horizontal shifts in bid curves observed in wholesale electricity markets are consistent with Cournot competition. Quantity competition reduces the informational requirements associated with evaluatin…

We argue that the corporate governance of emerging economy IPO firms is influenced by firm-specific institutionally embedded block ownership groups. Applying an extended institutional logic perspectiv…

This paper examines employment and productivity dynamics in the Swedish business sector during the period 1996–2013. In order to analyze employment and productivity in a consistent way we apply a nove…

Instructional time is seen as an important determinant of school performance, but little is known about the effects of student absence. Combining historical records and administrative data for Swedish…

We propose a method to recover homothetic preferences from choice data with minor optimization or measurement errors. Our method allows for a more detailed graphical analysis to reveal subjects' prefe…

When and how do entrepreneurs sell their inventions? To address this issue, we develop an endogenous entry-sale asymmetric information oligopoly model. We show that lowquality inventions are sold dire…

For about seventy years, the Canadian Wheat Board (CWB) was one of the world’s largest export “single desk” state traders in agriculture, until it was deregulated in 2012 and stripped of its marketing…

We show that a common regulatory mandate in electricity markets that use location-based pricing that requires all customers to purchase their wholesale electricity at the same quantity-weighted averag…

The association between occupational status and health has been taken to reveal the presence of health inequalities shaped by occupational status. However, that interpretation assumes no influence of…

We build a public finance model that explains why voters vote for right-wing populists, and also under which conditions established politicians will adopt a right-wing populist policy platform. Voters…

We decompose the impact of trade reform on technology adoption and land use to study how aggregate changes were driven by reallocation versus within-farm adaptation. Using detailed census data coverin…

We report the results of a randomized controlled trial testing whether incentivizing physical exercise improves the academic performance of college students. As expected, the intervention increases ph…

This paper studies the effect of the 1918–19 influenza pandemic on fertility using a historical dataset from Sweden. Our results suggest an immediate reduction in fertility driven by morbidity, and ad…

This paper develops a stylized model of cross-border balancing. We distinguish three degrees of cooperation: autarky, reserves exchange and reserves sharing. The model shows that TSO cooperation reduc…

We estimate impacts of exposure to an infant health intervention trialled in Sweden in the early 1930s using purposively digitised birth registers linked to school catalogues, census fies and tax reco…

We find an inverted relation between a player's birthday and the likelihood of receiving the Ballon d'Or (awarded to the best football player in the world). We develop a multi-period skill formation m…

The Swedish employer paid payroll tax was reduced substantially for young workers in 2007, causing firms’ average social fees to depend on the age structure of their employees. Using pre-reform condit…

Using the World Management Survey method, we map and analyse management quality in Swedish primary care centres. On average, private providers have higher management quality than public ones. We also…

Religious beliefs and practices influence individual lives and societies in many ways. We study how religion affects self-assessed health, which in turn is important for both individual well-being and…

In this paper, we analyze how a suffrage reform in 1862/63 that shifted the de jure distribution of political power from landowners to industrialists affected Sweden’s industrialization and economic a…

We analyze an investor who delegates information acquisition and investment decisions to an agent. The investor cannot monitor the agent’s effort or information. Optimal pay schemes contain bonuses th…

Cross-country comparisons of entrepreneurship are difficult due to the lack of standard empirical definitions of entrepreneurship. Measures focusing on small business activity and self-employment sugg…

We propose a management career model where females face a gender-specific career hurdle. We show that female managers will, on average, be more skilled than male managers, since females from the low e…

Europe continues to lag behind the U.S. in venture capital (VC) activity and in the creation of successful startups, and has recently been surpassed by China. This is despite the fact that many Europe…

As cities increasingly become centers of economic growth and innovation, there is a need to understand their inner workings and organization in greater detail. We use ge-coded firm-level panel data at…

We estimate trends in global earnings dispersion across occupational groups using a new database covering 66 developed and developing countries between 1970 and 2015. Our main finding is that global e…

Board room quotas have recently received an increasing amount of attention. This paper provides novel evidence on firm performance from an exogenous change in female board participation in Sweden. We…

An increasing reliance on solar and wind power has raised concern about system ability to consistently satisfy electricity demand. This paper examines countries unilateral incentives to achieve supply…

By the late 1960s, real effective taxation of income from individual firm owner­ship in Sweden approached 100 percent. A series of tax reforms initiated in the late 1970s reversed this situation. This…

Timothy Snyder has suggested an interpretive framework of the Holocaust that runs counter to previous scholarly literature as well as to popular perception. Snyder’s central thesis is that the mass mu…

According to Swedish penal code, there is a “rebate” on all prison sentences before the 21st birthday. We exploit this age discontinuity to investigate how individuals respond to harsher punishments.…

We study the link between tax progressivity and top income shares. Using variation from large-scale Western tax reforms in the 1980s and 1990s and the novel synthetic control method, we find large and…

We compile data spanning the period 1900–2014 and up to 30 countries to study long-run patterns in the tax elasticity of top incomes. Our results show that top tax elasticities vary tremendously over…

Christmas is when people are expected to act selflessly for the well-being of others, but are people actually more altruistic at this time of the year? Responding to this question poses a challenge be…

A successful transformation to a carbon neutral energy system requires the correct investments in transmission and production capacity. In a zonal pricing electricity market, the one proposed by the E…