Johan Stennek and Thomas P. Tangerås
This paper questions whether competition can replace sector-specific regulation of mobile telecommunications. We show that the monopolistic outcome prevails independently of market concentration when access prices are determined in bilateral negotiations.…
Henrik Horn and Petros C. Mavroidis
This paper surveys the law and economics literature on WTO dispute settlement. As a background, we first briefly lay out main features of the legal framework, and discuss possible roles of a dispute settlement mechanism. We then discuss the two main…
Mikael Stenkula
The policy debate in recent years has increasingly focused on issues concerning size distribution of firms and employment. It is often claimed that we are approaching a new economic era where large enterprises have lost their importance in developed…
Sven-Olof Fridolfsson and Johan Stennek
There is diverging empirical evidence on the competitive effects of horizontal mergers: consumer prices (and thus presumably competitors' profits) often rise while competitors' share prices fall. Our model of endogenous mergers provides a possible…
Assar Lindbeck
This paper applies a systems-oriented, “holistic” approach to China’s radical economic reforms during the last quarter of a century. It characterizes China’s economic reforms in terms of a multidimensional classification of economic systems. When looking…
Assar Lindbeck
I discuss the nature of the economic reforms in China during the last quarter of a century in the context of a typology of economic systems, emphasizing the interaction between economic and social mechanisms. I also consider China’s options for further…
Henrik Jordahl and Che-Yuan Liang
We use the 1952 Swedish municipal amalgamation reform to study free-riding and the common pool problem in politics. We expect municipalities that were affected by the reform to increase their debt in anticipation of a merger, and this effect to be larger…
Robin Douhan, Gunnar Eliasson and Magnus Henrekson
Israel M. Kirzner is the 2006 winner of The International Award for Entrepreneurship and Small Business Research. In this essay, we present and evaluate his main contributions to the economics of entrepreneurship. The focus is on how Kirzner defines the…
Daniel Waldenström
Recent theoretical models suggest that the costs governments face when defaulting on their domestic and external debt may differ considerably. This paper examines if this proposed cost difference is reflected in sovereign risk spreads across domestic and…
Daniel Waldenström and Bruno S. Frey
The conventional Nordic historiography of World War II states that there were few, if any, in the Nordic countries who perceived a significantly increased threat of war between 1938 and early 1940. At the same time, historical methods face problems when…
Fredrik Heyman, Fredrik Sjöholm and Patrik Gustavsson Tingvall
Multinational firms pay relatively high wages. Less is known about the wage structure within multinational and non-multinational firms. We examine the impact of acquisitions on wage dispersion in Sweden using a large matched employer-employee data set.…
Fredrik Heyman, Fredrik Sjöholm and Patrik Gustavsson Tingvall
Numerous studies on firm-level data have reported higher average wages in foreign-owned firms than in domestically-owned firms. This, however, does not necessarily imply that the individual worker’s wage increase with foreign ownership. Using detailed…
Magnus Gustavsson and Henrik Jordahl
We present new evidence on the influence of income inequality on generalized trust. Using individual panel data from Swedish counties together with an instrumental variable strategy, we find that differences in disposable income, and especially…
Igor Mouraviev
The paper studies the role of communication in facilitating collusion. The situation of infinitely repeated Cournot competition in the presence of antitrust enforcement is considered. Firms observe only their own production levels and a common market…
Niclas Berggren, Henrik Jordahl and Panu Poutvaara
We study the role of beauty in politics. For the first time, focus is put on differences in how women and men evaluate female and male candidates and how different candidate traits relate to success in real and hypothetical elections. We have collected…
Pehr-Johan Norbäck and Lars Persson
We show that, in the case when innovations are for sale, increased product market competition, captured by reduced product market profits, can increase the incentives for innovations. The reason is that the incentive to innovate depends on the acquisition…
Jens Forssbæck and Lars Oxelheim
We study the interplay between money market development and changes in monetary policy operating procedures in 11 European countries from c. 1980 up to the launch of EMU. Aspects of money market development such as the size and structure of different…
Niclas Andrén and Lars Oxelheim
We analyze producer price developments in the transition from a national exchange rate regime to a monetary union. The focus is on the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). Stylized facts witness about an exploding gaps in producer-price inflation…
Jesper Roine and Daniel Waldenström
This study presents new homogenous series of top income shares in Sweden over the period 1903–2004. We find that, starting from levels of inequality approximately equal to those in other Western countries at the time, the income share of the Swedish top…
Pehr-Johan Norbäck and Lars Persson
Investment liberalizing countries are often concerned that cross-border mergers & acquisitions, in contrast to greenfield investments, might have an adverse effect on domestic firms and consumers. However, given that domestic assets are…
Harald Edquist and Magnus Henrekson
This study consists of an examination of productivity growth following three major technological breakthroughs: the steam power revolution, electrification and the ICT revolution. The distinction between sectors producing and sectors using the new…
Roger Svensson
External financing is important when inventors and small technology-based firms wish to commercialize their inventions. However, it is likely that problems related to adverse selection and moral hazard are present, and market failures occur, since…
Pehr-Johan Norbäck, Lars Persson and Jonas Vlachos
We find that reduced foreign corporate taxes may lead to inefficient foreign acquisitions if complementarities between foreign and domestic assets are low, and to efficient foreign acquisitions if such complementarities are high. Moreover, with large…
Assar Lindbeck
This paper starts out with a brief discussion of the historical background, the justifications and the political forces behind the built up of the modern welfare state. It also summarizes its major achievements in terms of economic efficiency and…
Olof Åslund, John Östh and Yves Zenou
We study the impact of job proximity on individual employment and earnings. The analysis exploits a Swedish refugee dispersal policy to get exogenous variation in individual locations. Using very detailed data on the exact location of all residences and…
Assar Lindbeck, Mårten Palme and Mats Persson
We analyze the consequences for sickness absence of a selective softening of job security legislation for small firms in Sweden in 2001. According to our differences-in-difference estimates, aggregate absence in these firms fell by 0.2-0.3 days per year.…
Assar Lindbeck and Mats Persson
A large literature on ex ante moral hazard in income insurance emphasizes that the individual can affect the probability of an income loss by choice of lifestyle and hence, the degree of risk-taking. The much smaller literature on moral hazard ex post…
Anne Boschini and Anna Sjögren
We investigate if voluntary team formation is gender neutral. To this end, we model team formation as a random matching process influenced by the agents' preferences for team size and gender composition and derive how team formation depends on the gender…
Henrik Horn
The National Treatment clause (NT) is the first-line defense in the GATT (and in most other trade agreements) against opportunistic exploitation of the inevitable incompleteness of the agreement. This paper examines the role of NT as it applies to…