Working Papers 2010–2019 (WP817–WP1312)

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…

The paper studies how stock price misvaluation and financial frictions affect whether an acquisition occurs between or within industries and whether the acquirer pays in cash or stocks. I set up a mod…

While previous research examines how institutions matter for general life satisfaction and how specific institutions embodying equal rights for gay people matter for the life satisfaction of gays, we…

Sorting of high-ability workers is a main source of urban-rural disparities in economic outcomes. Less is known about when such human capital sorting occurs and who it involves. Using data on 15 cohor…

There is a need for a conceptual approach that, with reference to explicit micro-level mechanisms and processes of industrial dynamics, articulates the role and function of entrepreneurial experimenta…

The interplay between entrepreneurship and institutions is crucial for economic development; however, the view that institutions determine the extent to which entrepreneurial activity is productive is…

Social trust has been identified as a catalyst for reforms. We take the literature further in two ways. First, we make a fine-grained analysis of mechanisms through which social trust enables liberali…

It is imperative that the economies of the European Union become more entrepreneurial to promote innovation and economic growth. To achieve these goals, we propose a reform strategy with respect to (i…

We conduct a contest experiment where participants can invest in increasing both the mean and the spread of an uncertain performance variable. Subjects are treated with different prize schemes and in…

In this paper, we provide some descriptive statistics of the first twenty years of the WTO (World Trade Organization) dispute settlement. The database used in this paper was assembled by the authors a…

This paper addresses women's under-representation in top jobs in organizational hierarchies. We show that promotions to top jobs dramatically increase women's probability of divorce, but do not affect…

Recent studies document a 30-year decline in various measures of entrepreneurship in the U.S. Using detailed Swedish employer-employee data over the period from 1990 to 2013, we find young firms to be…

Several recent behavioral models of choice build on the idea that decision makers put more weight on attributes in which the available options differ more. We test this assumption in a controlled expe…

We nuance the widely held view that well-functioning institutions are the ultimate prerequisite for innovation and entrepreneurship. This is done by putting the spotlight on the role that formal and i…

In a radical school choice reform in 1992, Sweden’s education system was opened to private competition from independent for-profit and non-profit schools funded by vouchers. Competition was expected t…

This paper studies the effect of the firm-size distribution on the relationship between employment and output. We construct a theoretical model, which predicts that changes in demand for industry outp…

Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) has increased in importance over the last decades, globally as well as in Indonesia. We examine how such inflows of FDI affects value added in Indonesia. The effect is…

Close to 2 700 state-to-state investment agreements (IIAs) worldwide protect foreign direct investment (FDI) against host country policies. We analyze the design and implications of protection against…

I examine the effects of privatization, in the form of acquisitions, in the Swedish electricity distribution sector. As the majority of the distribution networks remained publicly owned, I use a synth…

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…

This paper presents evidence of how attitudes toward gender roles in the home and market are shaped by Hofstede’s six cultural dimensions. Children of immigrants in a broad set of European countries w…

Delegated contracting describes a widely observable agency mode where a top principal, who has no direct access to a productive downstream agent, hires an intermediary to forward a sub-contract with s…

Previous studies of policy responses to economic crises argue that crises may lead to more interventionist policy but also cause deregulation. The empirical evidence in previous studies is equally mix…

This study uses new data on Swedish national wealth over the last two hundred years to examine whether the patterns in wealth-income ratios found by Piketty and Zucman (2014) extend to small and less…

Can a democracy attract competent leaders, while attaining broad representation? Economic models suggest that free-riding incentives and lower opportunity costs give the less competent a comparative a…

Social trust is linked to many desirable economic and social outcomes. Using new data from a representative sample of 2,668 Swedish expatriates, we examine the robustness of high social trust in count…

This paper presents new estimates of wealth inequality in Sweden during 2000–2012, linking wealth register data up to 2007 and individually capitalized wealth based on income and property tax register…

The sharing economy (peer-to-peer based sharing or renting activities coordinated through community-based online services) is typically assumed to be closely related to social trust. The two sharing e…

We estimate the impact of the removal of a railway transportation subsidy on the local economies of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, exploiting the large regional variation in these one-time freigh…

The surplus that is created in a successful entrepreneurial venture is much higher than the profit corresponding to the risk-adjusted market rate of return. The part of the surplus that exceeds this l…

Sweden has a school voucher system with universal coverage and full acceptance of corporate providers. Using a value added approach, we find that students at upper-secondary voucher schools on average…

We analyse how the Bosman ruling changed the incentives for football clubs in the European Union (EU) to develop talents. We show that the stiffer bidding competition over star players after the Bosma…

This paper investigates the intergenerational transmission of health in the very long run. Using a unique purpose-built administrative dataset on individuals born in Sweden between 1930–34 and their p…

This paper investigates the potential of an infant intervention to improve life expectancy, contributing to emerging interest in the early life origins of chronic disease. We analyse a pioneering prog…

A large and growing empirical literature has presented evidence of job polarization, i.e. the simultaneous growth of high-wage jobs and low-wage jobs at the expense of middle-wage jobs. Thus far, the…

This study examines the role of institutional environment in influencing the migration of corporate governance best practice into 22 emerging African economies.  Using a unique and comprehensive sampl…

We use new population-wide register data on inheritances and wealth in Sweden to estimate the causal impact of inheritances on wealth inequality. We find that inheritances reduce relative wealth inequ…

Even though the World Trade Organization (WTO) ensures equal access to the dispute settlement system, the legal process is still highly costly, an aspect that primarily affects poorer developing count…

High levels of social trust has been linked to both public sector size and long term economic growth, thereby helping to explain how some countries are able to combine high taxes and relatively high l…

Although institutional reforms are necessary to increase rates of entrepreneurship in European countries, we argue that one-size-fits-all reform strategies are unlikely to be successful. Reform strate…

I study the link between taxes and youth self-employment. I make use of a Swedish reform, implemented in 2007–09, which suddenly made the payroll tax and the self-employment tax vary by age. The resul…

We survey the literature on the economic consequences of the structure of social networks. We develop a taxonomy of `macro' and `micro' characteristics of social interaction networks and discuss both…

Over the past two decades, the U.S. stock market has halved in size as the “public firm model” has begun to fall out of favor. We develop a political economy model of delistings from the stock market…

This paper analyses the short- and longer-term effects of retirement on mental health in ten European countries. It exploits thresholds created by state pension ages in an individual-fixed effects ins…

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…