Publications

It is often assumed that there is a trade-off between civil rights and national safety although the association is theoretically ambiguous. This article therefore explores this association by estimati…

This chapter comprises three main parts. The first part is about data sources, the definitions of income, and the methodologies used to estimate top income shares. Both the standard sources and method…

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…

Nine out of 10 constitutions contain explicit emergency provisions, intended to help governments cope with extraordinary events that endanger many people or the existence of the state. We ask two ques…

The 2020 Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research has been awarded to Professor John Haltiwanger. John Haltiwanger has made significant contributions to the field of entrepreneurship by improving ou…

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…

Previous studies have stressed the role of a child's family environment for future political participation. This field of research has, however, overlooked that children within the same family have di…

We used an experiment to investigate whether people’s decisions over employment opportunities are affected by the ethnicity and sex of their potential future coworkers. University students (N = 1,406)…

The cryptocurrency Bitcoin has been marketed as revolutionary new money and an attractive investment. But closer examination suggests that Bitcoin works poorly as money and does not qualify as an asse…

Constructing football fields in Sweden with artificial turf has grown in popularity in recent years. Although the increase in playing time per year is a significant benefit of using artificial turf, t…

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…

Economic growth requires factor reallocation across firms and continuous replacement of technologies. Labor market institutions influence economic dynamism by their impact on the supply of a key facto…

Based on historical analogies, we emphasize a connection between financial crises and technological shifts that calls for a structural economic transformation. Political pressures related to this stru…

This paper presents an empirical test of the anticompetitive effects of joint ownership by examining the operation of three nuclear plants in Sweden. Since maintenance is the main conduit explaining v…

As a recent literature has demonstrated, men and women differ in their willingness to sort into competitive environments. In particular, men are more willing than women to compete. We investigate whet…

The basic policy tool for increasing FDI is international investment agreements (IIAs), state-to-state treaties that protect FDI against host country policy measures. This note focuses on the IIA of m…

Limiting the spread of contagious diseases can involve both government-managed and voluntary efforts. Governments have a number of policy options beyond direct intervention that can shape individuals…

The significance of supply chain collaboration, communication and data exchange along with the importance of the relationships established among interconnected parties in a digital connected world, in…

In recent years, commercial banks have substantially reduced the number of their branch offices. We address the question of whether or not the increased distance to lenders caused by branch office clo…

We analyze the relationship between cognitive ability and bunching in the context of a large and salient kink point of the Swedish income tax schedule. Using population-wide register data from the Swe…

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…

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…

Multinational firms (MNEs) are key actors in the global economy, accounting for more than one-fifth of global output and more than two-thirds of global trade (Qiang et al., 2020). Moreover, approximat…

Wealth inequality has attracted considerable attention in recent years. This column presents new historical evidence that revises earlier results and reveals long-term patterns. A key finding is that…

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 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…

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 household-level changes in alcohol consumption in response to pregnancy. Using scanner data, we identify households with a pregnant household member. Within an event study and a dynamic dif…

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 read books in recurring cycles, by subject. The first subject is Economics, then History, followed by Music and Art. Each cycle is concluded with Other, which is anything else, including fiction. I…

We estimate how labor force participation among married women in Sweden responded to changing work incentives implied by a reform in the tax and transfer system in 1997. Using rich, population-wide, a…

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…

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…

We argue that so-called geographies of discontent work within regional hierarchies in a spatial continuum, whereas the previous literature has mainly invoked dichotomous divides, such as core-peripher…

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…

This chapter reflects on the role of wage policies in facilitating the labour market integration of immigrants. The overall analysis in this chapter suggests that minimum wage cuts, combined with othe…

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

Sweden is often described as a country where intergenerational social mobility is high, but research also shows that social mobility decreases the closer one gets to the extreme top of the income dist…

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…

We investigate two parallel school reforms in Sweden to assess the long-run health effects of education. One reform only increased years of schooling, while the other increased years of schooling but…

Several behavioural models of choice assume that decision makers place more weight on attributes where options differ more, an assumption we test in a set of experiments. We find that subjects are mor…

Recent micro-level studies have suggested that globalization—in particular, economic globalization and trade with China—breeds political polarization and populism. This study examines whether or not t…

Throughout the Western world, power has come to be seen as something that should be restricted at all costs, because increasingly power is associated with coercion, fraud, ruthlessness, and violence.…

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…

I explore the association between the severity of lockdown policies in the first half of 2020 and mortality rates. Using two indices from the Blavatnik Centre’s COVID-19 policy measures and comparing…

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…

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…

A common coinage policy in the Middle Ages was ‘periodic recoinage’. Old coins were declared invalid and had to be exchanged for new ones at specified exchange rates and dates. This convention was a t…

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…

What is the effect of coups d’état on repression? Do ‘bad’ coups against democracies decrease respect for physical integrity rights? Does it make a difference whether a coup d’état is staged by the mi…

We use data on estate divisions to study to whom altruistic preferences are directed. Insofar bequests are given without the prospect of future personal benefits in mind, they are presumably intrinsic…

Since the 1990s, the Swedish education market has gone through a dramatic transformation due to the introduction of voucher-funded independent schools. We make use of data on school applications to co…

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…

We present and discuss evidence on electric-vehicle rollout in The Netherlands and Norway, two forerunners in this area. We demonstrate that the uptake of electric vehicles is essentially driven by fi…

The opponents of big‐box entry argue that large retail establishments generate a variety of negative externalities. The advocates, on the contrary, argue that access to a large retail market not only…

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…

This paper asks whether the sensitivity of market long-term interest rates and credit ratings is associated with cross-country differences in informal institutions, measured by social trust. We note a…

Standing at 24% in 2018, India’s female labour force participation is only half of the global average (48%). At the same time, India has one of the widest gender wage gaps in the world and women are l…

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…

Populism is a foreseeable reaction against the limited moral conception of society offered by both traditional left and right parties. Traditional parties have effectively rendered many voters homeles…

In this essay, we discuss the requirements of a successful management of a company's exposure to foreign exchange risks. We argue that the company's performance is affected by foreign exchange risks a…

Media freedom is often curtailed in the wake of terrorist attacks. In this contribution, we ask whether constitutional provisions that are intended—directly or indirectly—to protect media freedom afec…

Promoters claim that bitcoin is a new type of money, reduces transactions costs by abandoning intermediaries and will become a safe asset that they call “digital gold”. In this book, we dissect these…

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…

Nearly 2700 highly potent international investment agreements protect foreign investment against host country policies. This paper analyzes the design and implications of their contentious provisions…

While recent research finds strong evidence that birth order affects outcomes such as education, IQ scores, earnings, and health, the evidence for effects on political outcomes is more limited. Using…

This article presents a methodology for empirically identifying the key player, whose removal from the network leads to the optimal change in aggregate activity level in equilibrium [Ballester, C., Ca…

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 proposes new power indices for revealed preference tests. The indices are based on models of irrational consumption behavior where the consumer randomly allocates a certain fraction of expe…

This note describes how research on the link between economic openness and government size has changed over time. Early interpretations suggested that countries develop welfare states to compensate fo…

In 2009, Sweden launched a freedom-of-choice reform that gave municipalities the option to introduce standardized quasi-markets in social services. The reform was initially popular to adopt in home ca…

Recent work in Cohn et al. (2019) shows that civic honesty and cooperative behaviour captured in a wallet-return experiment varies considerably across the world. Similarly, beliefs about social trust…

Part-time jobs during high school provide one of the most commonly-used pathways into regular employment. This note discusses why such contacts are an important job search channel for young workers, a…

We demonstrate how successful entrepreneurship depends on a collaborative innovation bloc (CIB), a system of innovation that evolves spontaneously and within which activity takes place through time. A…

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…

For millennia, money has acted as a store of value as reducing transaction costs – crypto does neither

Coups and regime transitions are events that typically are intended to change the basic institutional framework of a country. Which specific institutions change and the consequences of these changes n…

This thesis consists of four self-contained essays. The papers are primarily empirical, and use a wide variety of data sources ranging from global survey data to administrative records. Essay I (with…

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…

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…

Intervening on modifiable risk factors to prevent dementia is of key importance, since progress-modifying treatments are not currently available. Education is inversely associated with dementia risk,…

While the association between economic freedom and long‐term economic growth has been well documented, the parallel research literature on the distributional consequences of economic freedom is full o…