Publications

This paper focuses on the ability of the labor market to correctly match heterogeneous workers to jobs within a given industry and the role that globalization plays in that process. Using matched work…

Political candidates on the right are more beautiful or are seen as more competent than candidates on the left in Australia, Finland, France, and the United States. This appearance gap gives candidate…

This paper investigates the effects of illegal file sharing (piracy) on music and movie sales. The Swedish implementation of the European Union directive IPRED on April 1, 2009 suddenly increased the…

In this introductory chapter to a collective volume, we build on Baumol’s (1990) framework to categorize, catalogue, and classify the budding research field that explores the interplay between institu…

Foreign direct investment has been important in the economic growth and global economic integration of developing countries over the last decades. Both Northeast and Southeast Asia, especially the lat…

This paper builds a theory of the shape of the distribution of total-factor productivity (TFP) across countries. The data on productivity suggests vast differences across countries, and arguably even…

Private equity buyouts have become a common element in the industrial development process. I survey the literature on the real economic effect of buyouts: employment, wages, productivity, and long-run…

The objective of this paper is twofold. First, against the background of existing empirical literature on the duration of trade which has found that international trade is often of strikingly short du…

A main component of custom unions is a common trade policy on imports from non-member countries. Trade policy covers both tariff and non-tariff barriers like trade procedures. We argue that since trad…

In this chapter we examine the role of the CFO in setting risk management strategy with respect to macroeconomic risk in particular, and we consider the information requirements for setting a strategy…

We investigate to what extent tolerance, as measured by attitudes toward different types of neighbors, affects economic growth. Data from the World Values Survey enables us to investigate tolerance–gr…

How should the world economy adapt to the increased demand for exhaustible resources from countries like China and India? To address that issue, this paper presents a dynamic model of the world econom…

Research on entrepreneurship has received an increased amount of interest in recent years, with self-employment being used as the most common proxy for “entrepreneurship” in empirical studies. However…

A strategically minded CFO will realize that strategic corporate risk management is about finding the right balance between risk prevention and proactive value generation. Efficient risk and performan…

Incentive effects of performance-based compensation schemes for management may be weakened or biased by macroeconomic influences on remuneration. These influences can be seen as reflecting luck from t…

The tax laws of most developed countries are debt biased since firms can deduct interest on debt but not on equity. This bias is known to distort investment decisions. However, less is known about how…

In this paper we treat an individual’s health as a continuous variable, in contrast to the traditional literature on income insurance, where it is regularly treated as a binary variable. This is not a…

Swedish elementary school children stopped receiving written end of year report cards following a grading reform in 1982. Gradual implementation of the reform creates an opportunity to investigate the…

The capacity of the transmission network determines the extent of integration of a multinational energy market. Cross-border externalities render coordination of network maintenance and investments ac…

In this paper we present survey evidence suggesting that there exists a sizeable fiscal illusion amongst the general public in Sweden. Respondents in a nation-wide and representative survey systematic…

North Korea is perceived by many as one of the most totalitarian societies of modern time. But in the wake of the economic collapse of the 1990s, North Korean totalitarianism has grappled with new con…

This paper studies the relationship between height and leadership. Using data from a representative sample of Swedish men, I document that tall men are significantly more likely to attain managerial p…

A recurring theme in evaluations of Swedish residential youth care is that treatment is often unplanned. In this paper, I show that planned treatment is strongly positively associated with treatment o…

This paper uses affiliate level data from Swedish multinationals to examine the impact of tax treaties on both overall affiliate sales and the composition of those sales. In line with previous results…

In this paper, I investigate whether instead of strengthening home-based production, government R&D-subsidies can induce R&D-intensive firms to locate production abroad. Investigating firm-lev…

Many developing countries would like to increase the share of modern or formal sectors in their employment. One way to accomplish this goal may be to encourage the entrance of foreign firms. They are…

Previous research, notably Baumol (1990), has highlighted the role of insti-tutions in channeling entrepreneurial supply into productive, unproductive or destructive activities. However, entrepreneurs…

The recent literature on the duration of trade has predominantly analyzed the determinants of trade flow durations using Cox proportional hazards models. The purpose of this paper is to show why it is…

The literature on trade facilitation has mostly focused on implications for trade volumes. However, recent theoretical contributions have emphasized that trade costs – such as transaction costs relate…

This study compares average earnings and productivities for men and women employed in roughly 200,000 Chinese industrial enterprises. Women’s average wages lag behind men’s wages by 11%, and this resu…

Public policy affects the prevalence and performance of both productive and high-impact entrepreneurship. High-impact entrepreneurship prospers when knowledge is successfully generated and exploited i…

In contrast to previous efforts to model the individual’s movement from wage work into entrepreneurship, we consider that individuals might transition incrementally by retaining their wage job while e…

This article consists of three parts. The first part deals with theory. We evaluate the pros and cons of government involvement in urban housing and of renting versus ownership. In the second part, we…

This study examines how globalization of corporate governance practices influences the risk of European CEOs being dismissed. We argue that the harsh monitoring of the American corporate governance sy…

I construct a model of public policy development, and use the model to explain why the United States has a comparatively small public sector, but instead a large "private welfare state" with employmen…

This essay argues that the economic contribution of certain firms – be they small, young or rapidly growing – has to be understood in a broader context of creative destruction. Growth of some firms re…

This paper presents a detailed analysis of voters’ responses to municipality and regional-level unemployment and economic growth, using panel data on 284 municipalities and 9 regions and covering Swed…

This study examines the determinants of citation success among authors who recently published their work in economic history journals. We find that full professors, authors from non-economic history d…

This paper carries out a critical reappraisal of the two contending theories purporting to explain long-run government spending: Wagner’s Law and different variants of the ratchet effect. We analyze d…

Private equity firms are an important part of the industrial restructuring process. We argue that the key is temporary ownership. Buying to sell induces aggressive restructuring since the equilibrium…

We survey the literature on social networks by putting together the economics, sociological and physics/applied mathematics approaches, showing their similarities and differences. We expose, in partic…

The make-or-buy decision is analyzed in a simple framework combining contractual incompleteness with the existence of imperfect but contractible performance measures. Contractual incompleteness gives…

Using the concept of market-distribution functions, we derive general optimality conditions for discriminatory divisible-good auctions, which are also applicable to Bertrand games and non-linear prici…

We study the effect of taxation on entrepreneurship, taking into account both the amount of entry and the quality of new ventures. We show that even with risk neutral agents and no tax evasion progres…

The supply function equilibrium provides a game-theoretic model of strategic bidding in oligopolistic wholesale electricity auctions. This paper presents an intuitive account of current understanding…

Studies of mortgage approvals find that minority borrowers are more likely to be denied loans, even when background variables such as current-year income are held constant. This article demonstrates t…

Political and legal institutions affect the extent to which the real exchange rates of oil-exporting countries co-move with the oil price. In a simple theoretical model, strong institutions insulate r…

After a severe crisis in the early 1990s, the Swedish economy experienced a boom in productivity growth. Economists have presented three explanations for the fast productivity growth in 1995–2004: mar…

The Industrial Institute of Economic and Social Research (IUI) was founded in 1939. In less than ten years, IUI grew from a small survey bureau to a leading research institute focused on microeconomic…

What explains the world-wide trend of pro-entrepreneurial policies? We study entrepreneurial policy in a lobbying model taking into account the conflict of interest between entrepreneurs and incumbent…

Twins-based estimates of the return to schooling feature prominently in the labor economics literature. The validity of such estimates hinges critically on the assumption that within-pair variation in…

We combine two empirical observations in a general equilibrium occupational choice model. The first is that entrepreneurs have more control than employees over the employment of and accruals from asse…

Public policy is currently shifting from SME policy towards entrepreneurship policy, which supports entrepreneurship without directing attention to quantitative goals and specific firms or employment…

Recent research has documented that competent-looking political candidates do better in U.S. elections and that babyfaced individuals are generally perceived to be less competent than maturefaced indi…

Cognitive dissonance theory predicts that the act of voting makes people more positive toward the party or candidate they have voted for. Following Mullainathan and Washington (2009), I test this pred…

In this paper we use newly compiled top income share data to estimate common breaks and trends across countries over the twentieth century. By using the most re-cent structural breaks techniques, our…

Does tax policy affect the rate of self-employment in a modern welfare state? This question is analyzed empirically based on Swedish data for the entire post-war period. Available tax data indicate th…

We develop a theory of commercialization mode (entry or sale) of entrepreneurial inventions into oligopoly, and show that an invention of higher quality is more likely to be sold (or licensed) to an i…

We use a survey to identify a consumer bias with regard to different sources of debt-financing. Less salient debt may generate psychological benefits. This should be weighed against the possible econo…

Can educational institutions explain occupational choice between wage employment and entrepreneurship? This paper follows Lazear's (2005) Jack-of-all-trades hypothesis according to which an individual…

Since July 2007 the world economy has experienced a severe financial crisis originating in the U.S. housing market. The crisis has subsequently spread to the financial sectors in European and Asian ec…

The paper estimates the causal effect of trade liberalisation on aggregate productivity through mechanisms related to firm selection. The construction of a bridge in 2000 across the Öresund Strait lin…

We use data from the military enlistment for a large representative sample of Swedish men to assess the importance of cognitive and noncognitive ability for labor market outcomes. The measure of nonco…

This paper discusses allocation of burden of proof in environmental disputes in the WTO system. Besides laying down the natural principles that (i) the complainant carries the burden to (ii) make a pr…

This paper analyzes effects of stronger patent rights on R&D and innovation. It presents a model where the scope of a patent affects an entrant firm's technology choice and thereby the amount of w…

This paper examines the role of the burden of proof (BoP) in National Treatment (NT) disputes under trade agreements. In the situation under study, imports may cause environmental damage, in which cas…

This paper introduces a market size dependent firm entry cost into the Melitz (2003) model. This is a relatively small generalisation, which preserves the analytical solvability of the model. Neverthe…

Media firms sometimes allow consumers to pay to remove advertisements from an advertisement-based product. We formally examine an ad-based monopolist's incentives to introduce this option. When decidi…

In most wholesale electricity markets generators must submit step-function offers of supply to a uniform price auction, and the market is cleared at the price of the most expensive offer needed to mee…

This paper characterizes the Nash equilibrium in a pay-as-bid (discriminatory), divisible-good, procurement auction. Demand by the auctioneer is uncertain as in the supply function equilibrium model.…

We identify pertinent institutions governing the structure of payoffs with regard to female career progression. Drawing on recent insights in behavioral economics, we hypothesize that interactions bet…

In this paper I attempt to replicate for Sweden the Corrado, Hulten and Sichel (2006) and Marrano and Haskel (2006) working papers on spending on intangible assets in the US and the UK. Based on their…

The make-or-buy decision is analyzed in a three-layer principal-management-agent model. There is a cost-saving/quality tradeoff in effort provision. The principal chooses between employing an in-house…

We construct a model where incumbents can either acquire basic innovations from entrepreneurs, or wait and acquire developed innovations from entrepreneurial firms supported by venture capitalists. We…

Exploiting the exogenous variation in user fees caused by a Swedish childcare reform, we are able to identify the causal effect of childcare costs on fertility in a context in which childcare enrollme…

We use Swedish matched employer-employee data to analyze the impact of multinational activity and foreign acquisitions on the relative demand for different job tasks. We contribute to the literature b…

Traditional methods for evaluating corporate credit risk rarely consider the impact of the macro economy on corporate value and performance. We argue that lenders and management can obtain valuable in…

Teachers are increasingly being drawn from the lower parts of the general ability distribution, but it is not clear how this affects student achievement. We track the position of entering teachers in…

It is often assumed that recent success in the high-technology software industry will lead India's development. However, evidence suggest that basic manufacturing industry is stagnant. This paper prop…

We propose a model of investments prior to corporate ownership changes. We derive conditions under which the selling of a firm triggers overinvestment by both the seller and the buyer prior to the ass…

In this paper we construct a model in which entrepreneurial innovations are sold into oligopolistic industries and where adverse selection problems between entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and incum…

This paper presents new evidence on intergenerational mobility in the top of the income and earnings distribution. Using a large dataset of matched father-son pairs in Sweden, we find that intergenera…

Swedish minimum wages are not regulated by law, but subject to bargaining between employers and trade unions and form part of collective agreements. This paper provides an overview of the Swedish mini…

The International Award for Entrepreneurship and Small Business Research was instituted in 1996, and it is now firmly established as the leading Prize for outstanding research contributions in the are…

We review the recent empirical research concerning market power on the Nordic wholesale market for electricity, Nord Pool. There is no evidence of blatant and systematic exploitation of system level m…

We analyze how the entry mode of Foreign Direct Investments (FDI) affects affiliate R&D activities. Using unique affiliate level data for Swedish multinational firms, we first present empirical ev…

We present and test a theory of prospective and retrospective pocketbook voting. Focusing on two large reforms in Sweden, we establish a causal chain from policies to sizeable individual gains and los…

A significant body of research has sought to examine claims that developing countries are under-represented as complainants, and/or over-represented as respondents in the WTO dispute settlement system…

The process of globalization encompasses economic and financial integration. Abolition of capital controls and dismantling of barriers of different kinds are important ingredients of the process that…

In this paper we empirically test the role of firm-specific financial characteristics as drivers of international investment and production. We hypothesize that financial strength generates advantages…

This paper reconsiders the predominant typology pioneered by Baumol (1990) among productive, unproductive and destructive entrepreneurship. It is shown that the foundation of Baumol’s classificatory s…

In this paper, we use a sample of almost 30,000 Swedish mono- and dizygotic twins to study the heritability of financial risk-taking. Following a major pension reform in the year 2000, virtually all S…

A large literature has studied the effect of displacement on labor market outcomes in general, but none has evaluated how the displaced manage as self-employed. This paper studies how the survival of…

We develop a simple yet realistic model of income insurance, where the individual’s ability and willingness to work is treated as a continuous variable. In this framework, income insurance not only pr…

In a recent paper, García-Mainar and Montuenga-Gómez (2005) apply the generalized IV model of Hausman and Taylor to estimate education returns of wage earners and the self-employed in Portugal and in…

Recent research has highlighted the role of institutions in channeling entrepreneurs into activities with positive or negative effects on overall productivity. Embedding central elements from these th…

Israel M. Kirzner is the 2006 winner of The International Award for Entrepreneurship and Small Business Research (the FSF-Nutek Award). In this Prize Lecture he argues that a number of those who have…

I apply a survival model to a detailed dataset of Swedish patents to estimate how different factors affect the likelihood of patent renewal. Since the owners know more about the patents than potential…

While the importance of institutions for explaining cross-country income differences is widely recognized, comparatively little is known about the origins of economic institutions. One strand of the l…

High-growth firms (HGFs) are critical for net job creation and economic growth. We analyze HGFs using the theory of competence blocs, linking firm growth to property rights and the interaction of comp…