Publications

A set of legal rules in liberal democracies guarantee freedom for individuals to shape their own lives. This study investigates whether such rules suffice to make people satisfied with the freedom the…

Nine out of ten modern constitutions contain explicit emergency provisions, describing who can call a state of emergency (and under which conditions) and the additional powers government enjoys under…

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…

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…

Complete financial markets allow countries to share their consumption risks internationally, thereby creating welfare gains through lower volatility of aggregate consumption. Using a panel of 116 coun…

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…

This book is the third volume in the research project coordinated by Sveriges Riksbank, Historical Monetary and Financial Statistics for Sweden. The first volume, published in 2010, dealt with exchang…

Bonds play a major role in government and corporate finance and have done so for several centuries. The bond market consists of two parts. In the primary bond market, states, local governments and pri…

This chapter presents the evolution of national wealth in Sweden from 1810 to 2020. The historical period spans agricultural and industrial eras as well as the postwar emergence of a globalized servic…

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…

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…

Previous research suggests that high-trust societies tend to write short constitutions. We document that this pattern is not specific to the entire constitution, but is equally reflected in the emerge…

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…

The book is the third in a series of three books on financial history and focuses on the historical development of property prices in Stockholm, in a series that extends back to the Middle Ages. This…

This paper uses Labor Force Survey data for European countries to estimate national investment in data assets, where the asset boundary is extended beyond that for software and databases as currently…

The war in the breadbasket of Europe, which spawned at the heels of the once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, sent major cereal prices spiralling upward. The unprecedented sequence of events leading to and inc…

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.…

Spatial variations in rates of new firm formation are large and spatially persistent over long periods of time. A common explanation of this empirical regularity is so-called local entrepreneurship cu…

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 files and tax rec…

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…

It is unclear whether democracies or autocracies are more likely to silence or control the media when facing attempt at overthrowing the government. Our estimate of the dynamics of press freedom sugge…

We investigate whether bank loans specifically designed to reduce credit constraints for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have different impacts depending on where the firm is located. Using…

This study aims to explore how to deanonymize cryptocurrency money launderers with the help of machine learning (ML). Money is laundered through cryptocurrencies by distributing funds to multiple acco…

Although there is abundant evidence on individual preferences for policies that reduce national inequality, there is very little evidence on preferences for policies addressing global inequality. To i…

The editors-in-chief of the Annals of Regional Science offer an overview and analysis of recent developments at the journal from January 2020 through December 2021, a time period hampered by the COVID…

The mobility of workers from multinational enterprises (MNEs) to other local firms is increasingly recognized as an important externality mechanism. However, MNEs have strong incentives to curb this m…

A vast economic literature examines the welfare gains and distributional consequences of economic reforms, while much less is generally known on the relationship of inequality and forced regime change…

Using longitudinal Swedish data, we document robust evidence of highly local spillovers between individuals in similar occupations. The results are consistent with the existence of knowledge spillover…

The choice of language affects how and what we learn. Domestic conditions are easier to describe in one’s native language, and therefore have more room to breathe when discussed in the native language…

This paper addresses the competing views by studying Sweden, a country with a dramatic growth in the number of MOCs since the 1970s. We examine the association between the number of MOCs, citizen sati…

Professors and researchers in the Philippines compete within a global arena of science and scholarship. To do so, they use English, even when English is not their native language. Do those who play th…

We show how symmetric equilibria emerge in general two-player contests in which skill and effort are combined to produce output according to a general production technology and players have skills dra…

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…

We provide plausibly identified evidence for the role of investor disagreement in asset pricing. Our natural experiment exploits the staggered implementation of the Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis…

Wage employment is the most commonly observed type of employment after a spell of entrepreneurship. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of having been an entrepreneur on earnings a…

We study the effects of patent scope and review times on startups and externalities on their rivals. We leverage the quasi-random assignment of U.S. patent applications to examiners and find that gran…

This paper studies the effect of emigration on technological change in sending lo- cations after one of the largest migration events in human history, the mass migration from Europe to the United Stat…

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…

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…

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

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

In 2014, the Swedish government introduced a specific kind of R&D tax relief, reducing firms’ payroll tax liability for R&D staff. In comparison to traditional tax incentives where all qualifi…

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…

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

In the late 1990s, Sweden had a uniquely well-functioning electricity system. It was virtually 100 per cent fossil-free, reliable, and cost-efficient. What went wrong?

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…

We use rich data on all business, economics, and engineering graduates in Sweden to study the lack of women among CEOs. A comprehensive battery of graduates’ characteristics explains 40% of the gender…

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…

Agroecology has been proposed as a strategy to improve food system sustainability, but has also been criticised for using land inefficiently. We compared five explorative storylines, developed in a st…

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 estimate a substantial female grade gain when being graded anonymously compared to male students in 101-macroeconomics courses. Females graded anonymously are more likely to continue with economics…

Leaf-thin bracteate coins were minted for several hundred years during the Mid[1]dle Ages. The existence of hundreds of small independent currency areas with their own mints in central, eastern and no…

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…

The revealed preference approach in economics is central to the empirical analysis of consumer behavior. This paper introduces the Stata commands checkax, aei, and powerps as a bundle within the packa…

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%)…

Certain markets are illicit because part of the supply is coerced, but little is known about the optimal regulation of such markets. We model a prostitution market with voluntary and coerced prostitut…

Entrepreneurship research has documented the importance of institutions but has not considered it as a multi-stage process. We therefore consider both nascent and realized entrepreneurship, finding th…

The meritocratic fairness ideal implies that inequalities in earnings are regarded as fair only when they reflect differences in performance. Consequently, implementation of the meritocratic fairness…

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…

The COVID-19 pandemic has not only caused millions to die and even more to lose their jobs, it has also prompted more governments to simultaneously declare a state of emergency than ever before enabli…

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…

The association between social trust and economic growth is well-documented but how it works remains an open theoretical and empirical question. The paper uses growth accounting to break down sources…

Some of the most contested questions in political science and political economy revolve around the conditions under which democratization is likely to happen and when democracy becomes a stable instit…

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 the context of Sweden, we show that having a doctor in the family raises preventive health investments throughout the lifecycle, improves physical health, and prolongs life. Two quasi-experimental…

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…

We revisit a Swedish comprehensive school reform first evaluated by Meghir and Palme (2005). This reform increased years of schooling and abolished tracking. We extend the original analysis to the ful…

Correct estimates of import demand elasticities are essential for measuring the gains from trade and predicting the impact of trade policies. We show that estimates of import demand elasticities hinge…

It is well-known that men and women differ in their views regarding the severity of climate change, but do they also differ in their support for climate policy and in undertaking climate action in the…

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,…

How does people’s ability influence their taxpaying behavior? This column links administrative tax and military enlistment registers in Sweden to measure how cognitive ability matters for income tax r…

We examine if international trade improves labor market integration of immigrants in Sweden. Immigrants participate substantially less than natives in the labor market. However, trading with a foreign…

This paper reports the results of a choice experiment designed to estimate the private welfare costs of stay-at-home policies during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study is conducted on a large and repres…

On the question of economic justice, political debate tends to swing between two poles. The Left wants to reduce economic differences based on the notion of distributive justice, while the Right empha…

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…

Consequences of social trust are comparatively well studied, while its societal determinants are often subject to debate. This paper studies both in the context of Catalan attempts to secede from Spai…

We examined customer and worker discrimination against gay and lesbian business owners using a web-based experiment conducted at a Swedish university campus. Participants (N = 1,406) were presented wi…

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…

While the debate over academic freedom has mostly focused on cultural issues, a new study investigates whether freedom of academic inquiry is also important for the economy. The results indicate that…

Immigrant integration is key to realizing the potential of international migration in economic development. However, integration is often thought to be hampered by immigrants' limited social networks…

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…

This chapter introduces the theme of the book—resilience in the EU. It presents definitions for these concepts and explores what the challenges of societal resilience entail for the EU. It is argued t…

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…

The concluding chapter reviews the EU’s handling of current crises and its search for sustainability and resilience. Beginning with its response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing public health…

Recent research has highlighted the contribution that managerial decisions make to firms’ productivity. This column uses a novel measure of job-worker allocation quality to document how firms that mat…

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…

Previous research has indicated that constitutionalized emergency provisions effectively constrain the behaviour of democratic governments subsequent to terrorist attacks. In this article, we ask if t…

In the aftermath of the Second World War, Sweden dismantled an education system that was strongly influenced by German, Neo-Humanist pedagogical principles in favor of a progressive, student-centered…

The fifth volume of the Interdisciplinary European Studies series aims to explore the EU’s pursuit of societal resilience and its role in the transition to a green economy. It brings together scholars…

This paper studies the sensitivity of long-run trends in top income shares to differences in top-share measures. While the standard measure fixes a share of the population, we define alternatives that…

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

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…