Lars Oxelheim
Being able to separate temporary global macroeconomic influences – caused by fluctuations in exchange rates, interest rates and inflation – from intrinsic performance – related to a superior product, production process or management - is…
Richard Öhrvall and Sven Oskarsson
Student mock elections are carried out in schools around the world in an effort to increase political interest and efficacy among students. There is, however, a lack of research on whether mock elections in schools enhance voter turnout in real…
Victor Ahlqvist, Pär Holmberg and Thomas Tangerås
In centralized markets, producers submit detailed cost data to the day-ahead market, and the market operator decides how much should be produced in each plant. This differs from decentralized markets that rely on self-commitment and where producers send…
Johan Klaesson, Özge Öner and Dieter Pennerstorfer
This article analyses the relationship between the size and the quality of ethnic enclaves on immigrants’ labour market integration. Using exogenously defined grid cells to delineate neighbourhoods we find robust empirical evidence that the…
Carl Magnus Bjuggren and Per Skedinger
We investigate the effect of employment protection legislation (EPL) on the propensity to hire workers from unemployment and active labor market programs (ALMPs), utilizing a reform that decreased dismissal costs for small firms only. Using administrative…
Mahir Sarfati, Mohammad Reza Hesamzadeh and Pär Holmberg
In part I of this paper, we proposed a Mixed-Integer Linear Program (MILP) to analyze imperfect competition of oligopoly producers in two-stage zonal power markets. In part II of this paper, we propose a solution algorithm which decomposes the proposed…
Mahir Sarfati, Mohammad Reza Hesamzadeh and Pär Holmberg
This paper is part I of a two-part paper. It proposes a two-stage game to analyze imperfect competition of producers in zonal power markets with a day-ahead and a real-time market. We consider strategic producers in both markets. They need to take both…
Andreas Bergh
The idea that all types of economic freedom – including limited government – promote prosperity is challenged by the fact that some countries successfully combine a large public sector with high taxes and otherwise high levels of economic…
Johan Klaesson and Özge Öner
The relevance of residential segregation and ethnic enclaves for labor market sorting of immigrants has been investigated by a large body of literature. Previous literature presents competing arguments and mixed results for the effects of segregation and…
Henrik Horn and Pehr-Johan Norbäck
International investment agreements have become increasingly controversial. The agreements are alleged to be beset with a large number of deficiencies that harm host countries in particular. For instance, they are said to cause “regulatory…
Carl Davidson, Fredrik Heyman, Steven Matusz, Fredrik Sjöholm and Susan Chun Zhu
Globalization affects the mix of jobs available in an economy and the rate at which workers gain skills. We develop a model in which firms differ in terms of productivity and workers differ in skills, and use the model to examine how globalization affects…
Henrik Horn
International investment agreements have provoked intense criticism in the policy debate during recent years. Particularly contentious has been their “ISDS” mechanisms, which enable investors to bring disputes against host countries. This…
Florin Maican and Matilda Orth
This paper studies the determinants of economies of scope in retail using a dynamic framework and novel product and store data. We estimate store productivity and consumers’ perceived shopping quality and analyze their relationship with intensive…
Malin Gardberg
Many currencies, especially those of countries with negative net foreign assets, tend to depreciate during times of financial turbulence. Using a panel of 26 currencies over the period 1/1997 – 6/2016, I show that the composition of net foreign…
Dan Johansson, Mikael Stenkula and Niklas Wykman
The tax system has at times favoured firm control through private foundations, which has been argued to inhibit high-impact entrepreneurship and economic growth. However, research has been hampered due to a lack of systematic historical tax data.
The…
Karin Edmark
This paper studies the location decisions of Swedish start-up independent schools. It makes use of the great expansion of independent schools following a reform implemented in 1992 to test what local market characteristics are correlated with independent…
Maria Abreu, Özge Öner, Aleid Brouwer and Eveline van Leeuwen
Our paper presents an empirical analysis of entrepreneurial well-being using a large-scale longitudinal household survey from the UK that tracks almost 50,000 individuals across seven waves over the period 2009–2017, as well as a number of…
Lars Persson and Thomas Tangerås
The world’s first multinational electricity market was formed with the creation of the Nordic power exchange, Nord Pool. We analyze the incentives to undertake transmission network investment in the context of the liberalized Nordic electricity…
Lina Aldén, Mats Hammarstedt and Hanna Swahnberg
We present results from a unique nationwide survey conducted in Sweden on sexual orientation and job satisfaction. Our results show that gay men, on average, seem more satisfied with their job than heterosexual men; lesbians appear less satisfied with…
Simon Ek and Magnus Henrekson
We study to what degree authors who publish in the five most prestigious journals in economics have previously published there and in which world region they are based. Although still high, the concentration of U.S.-based and previously published top-five…
Niclas Berggren and Christian Bjørnskov
Government debt is high in most developed countries, and while it may reflect short-term attempts to kick-start the economy in times of crisis through fiscal stimulus, the longer-term consequences risk being detrimental to investment and growth. This…
Mårten Blix and Johanna Jeansson
Sweden combines a vibrant market economy with a large public sector. This combination of public and private also characterizes the country’s comprehensive tax-financed welfare services. More than one-third of primary health care is today produced in…
Mounir Karadja and Erik Prawitz
We study the political effects of mass emigration to the United States in the 19th century using data from Sweden. To instrument for total emigration over several decades, we exploit severe local frost shocks that sparked an initial wave of emigration,…
Jens Josephson and Joel Shapiro
The poor performance of credit ratings of structured finance products in the financial crisis has prompted investigation into the role of credit rating agencies (CRAs) in designing and marketing these products. We analyze a two-period reputation model in…
Mats Hammarstedt and Chizheng Miao
We present a study of immigrant self-employment in Sweden using the recent matched employer-employee data from 2014. We find large variations in self-employment rates among immigrant groups as well as between immigrants with different points for their…
Andreas Bergh and Günther Fink
More than 50 years after independence, the majority of countries in Sub-Saharan Africa remain poor with limited rates of economic growth. One of the most striking features of economic development on the sub-Saharan subcontinent is the remarkably poor…
Olle Folke, Johanna Rickne and Daniel M. Smith
Throughout history and across countries, women appear more likely than men to enter politics at the heels of a close relative or spouse. We provide a theoretical explanation for this dynastic bias in gender representation that integrates political…
Ali Ahmed and Mats Hammarstedt
This paper studies customer discrimination against fictive male and female food truck owners with Arabic names on a Swedish University campus using a web-based experiment.
Students at a Swedish university campus were asked to participate in a market…
Martin Falk and Roger Svensson
The aim of this paper is to provide new empirical evidence on the most crucial determinants of success for firms applying for public R&D grants. Previous studies have been limited to firm level data and mainly tested how firm characteristics affect…
Martin Olsson and Joacim Tåg
The media often cast foreign private equity firms as villains who gamble with local jobs. We use detailed registry data from Sweden to show that foreign buyouts have not affected workers' labor market outcomes. But domestic buyouts have. They have…
Lina Aldén and Mats Hammarstedt
This paper compares life satisfaction among the elderly (61 years of age or older) who are self-employed, wage-employed or out of the labour force in Sweden with the help of a unique survey.
Sweden is interesting since the share of elderly, just as in…
Magnus Henrekson and Johan Wennström
The Swedish school system suffers from profound problems with teacher recruitment and retention, knowledge decline, and grade inflation. Absenteeism is high, and psychiatric disorders have risen sharply among Swedish pupils in the last ten years.
In…
Shon Ferguson and Johan Gars
The purpose of this study is to measure the sensitivity of traded quantities and trade unit values to agricultural production shocks. We develop a general
equilibrium model of trade in which production shocks in exporting countries affect both traded…
Joakim Jansson and Björn Tyrefors
In this paper, we first present novel evidence of grading bias against women at the university level. This is in contrast to previous results at the secondary education level. Contrary to the gender composition at lower levels of education in Sweden, the…
Christian Bjørnskov, Andreas Freytag and Jerg Gutmann
This paper explores the dynamics of press freedom around events that threaten or oust the incumbent regime of a country. While democracies on average grant the press more freedom, our theoretical starting point is that democracies and autocracies may have…
Shon Ferguson and Magnus Henrekson
Policymakers in several countries have recently taken steps to promote the rapid export expansion of high-tech small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The goal of these policies has been to create successful export-intensive firms, which are often…
Martin Fischer, Martin Karlsson, Therese Nilsson and Nina Schwarz
We evaluate the impact on earnings, pensions, and further labor market outcomes of two parallel educational reforms increasing instructional time in Swedish primary school. The reforms extended the annual term length and compulsory schooling by comparable…
Niklas Elert and Magnus Henrekson
We argue that scholars in the Austrian tradition of economics should incorporate the notion of a collaborative innovation bloc into their study of spontaneous market order. We demonstrate how successful entrepreneurship depends on an innovation bloc of…
W. Mark Brown, Shon Ferguson and Crina Viju
Using detailed census data covering over 40,000 farms in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, Canada, we document the vast and increasing farm size heterogeneity, and analyze the role of farm size in adapting to the removal of an export subsidy in…
Erik Lindqvist, Robert Östling and David Cesarini
We surveyed a large sample of Swedish lottery players about their psychological well-being and analyzed the data following pre-registered procedures. Relative to matched controls, large-prize winners experience sustained increases in overall life…
Louise Johannesson
The dispute settlement mechanism (DSM) is today the most active dispute resolution forum in the world. However, its success has also led to increased processing time of disputes, which, in turn, increases the cost of using the World Trade Organization…
Lars Persson and Thomas Seiler
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 firms. Based on this evidence, we construct an…
Jonas Vlachos
In Sweden, a trust-based system of school performance evaluation meets a market-oriented school system with liberal entry conditions for voucher-funded private providers. National standardized tests are graded at the local school and what ultimately…
Michael Anyadike-Danes, Carl Magnus Bjuggren, Michel Dumont, Sandra Gottschalk, Werner Hölzl, Dan Johansson, Mika Maliranta, Anja Myrann, Kristian Nielsen and Guanyu Zheng
The basic principle governing the development of the accounting framework is the choice of appropriate comparators. Firstly, when measuring contributions to job creation, we should focus on just job creating firms, otherwise we are summing over…
Mathias Ekström
The current study provides the first experimental test of the compromise effect, i.e. the tendency to choose middle options, in a naturally occurring setting. Simultaneously, I propose and evaluate a novel nudge intended to stimulate active…
Björn Bartling, Alexander W. Cappelen, Mathias Ekström, Erik Ø. Sørensen and Bertil Tungodden
The paper reports the first experimental study on people’s fairness views on extreme income inequalities arising from winner-take-all reward structures.
We find that the majority of participants consider extreme income inequality generated in…
Mats A. Bergman, Henrik Jordahl and Sofia Lundberg
We study a reform by which a standardized model of choice and competition was introduced in tax-financed home care in a majority of Swedish municipalities. The market for home care is of particular interest since it is close to the ideal quasi-market. For…
Henrik Jordahl and Lovisa Persson
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 share of worked hours) we avoid several problems that have…
Mohammad Reza Hesamzadeh, Pär Holmberg and Mahir Sarfati
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 the output in the dayahead market and decrease it in…
Shon Ferguson, Magnus Henrekson and Louise Johannesson
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 successful export-intensive startups, which are often referred…
Keith Ruddell
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 optimality conditions for supply functions for…
Keith Ruddell
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, but constrained, transmission line. The market admits…
Wolfgang Gick and Alex Weissensteiner
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 face value or instead structure consultation with…
Niclas Berggren, Andreas Bergh, Christian Bjørnskov and Shiori Tanaka
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 from 29,000 immigrants in the European Social Survey to…
Andreas Bergh and Philipp C. Wichardt
This paper reports results from a classroom dictator game comparing the effects of three different sets of standard instructions. As was shown by Oxoby
and Spraggon (2008), inducing a feeling of entitlement – one subject earning the endowment…
Per Skedinger
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 that non-standard employment contributes to a…
Claire Economidou, Luca Grilli, Magnus Henrekson and Mark Sanders
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 make the transition to a more entrepreneurial society.…
Selin Dilli, Niklas Elert and Andrea M. Herrmann
While entrepreneurship researchers agree that institutions ‘matter’ for entrepreneurship, they also have a rather encompassing understanding of institutions as almost any external factor that influences entrepreneurship.
Ultimately, this…
Martin Olsson and Joacim Tåg
The world is in the midst of a wave of privatization of state-owned enterprises. We examine how privatization affects workers and how firm-level employment relates to worker-level estimates. Using administrative data from Sweden, we show that following a…
Carl Magnus Bjuggren and Magnus Henrekson
This paper investigates career choices of women who marry high-income men. We find that women married to men in the top of the income distribution are more likely to enter self-employment, which is also associated with a lower income. This can be…
Pehr-Johan Norbäck, Lars Persson and Joacim Tåg
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 mergerstable industry. This can help antitrust authorities…
Marco Di Maggio, Amir Kermani and Kaveh Majlesi
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’ portfolio weights in previous years as an…
Niclas Berggren and Christian Bjørnskov
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 inferred ulterior motives and a desire to enrich…
Emanuele Colonnelli, Joacim Tåg, Michael Webb and Stefanie Wolter
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 the UK, and find that the large firm premium exists in…