News

Daniel Waldenström, IFN, is one of the participants in this year's SNS Tylösand Summit: Economic policy in the covid world and beyond.

Game theory models to explain acquisitions, measures of automation, and a greenness index. These are three areas that this year’s summer assistants at IFN have worked with and that have given them new insights on economic research to take with them to further studies during the fall.

Özge Öner, IFN and University of Cambridge, and her co-author Maria Abreu, University of Cambridge, are awarded the Ashby Prize for their paper "Disentangling the Brexit vote: The role of economic, social and cultural contexts in explaining the UK's EU referendum vote".

Bitcoin is neither money, a financial asset nor digital gold. Instead, it should be seen as an open Ponzi scheme, argue Roger Svensson, IFN , and Bob Seeman, the authors of the new book Bitcoin: Unlicensed Gambling.

Bitcoin lacks a solid foundation as an international currency, writes Roger Svensson, IFN, in an opinion piece in Financial Times.

There has been a shift in economic activity and away from young firms toward large, mature ”superstar” firms, said professor John Haltiwanger in his prize lecture when he received the Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research.

Digitization, migration, and the Covid crisis have brought on a rapid change in the Swedish business sector. To better respond to the need for high-quality analysis of the various factors relevant to the function of the business sector, IFN is developing two of its research programs.

IFN researcher Henrik Horn's paper  ”International Jurisdiction over Standard-Essential Patents” is nominated for the Antitrust Writing Awards 2021.  The Award is issued by Concurrence and George Washington University. The paper is nominated within the category Intellectual Property and is one of ten nominated papers.

Niclas Berggren, IFN, has been appointed a member of the Editorial Board for the journal Public Choice.

The new book Privatizing Welfare Services: Lessons from the Swedish Experiment, by IFN researchers Mårten Blix and Henrik Jordahl, is reviewed by professor Diane Coyle in her blog The Enlightened Economist.

Matilda Orth, IFN, and Florin Maican, affiliated to the IFN, have written a column on the dynamic impact of exporting on firm R&D investment in Vox EU. Together with their co-authors Mark Roberts, Pennsylvania State University, and Van Anh Vuong, Maastricht University, they use a structural framework to estimate the returns to innovation investments and analyze the impact of trade of those returns.

One of their conclusions is that the long payoff to R&D investment is higher for firms that are active and operate more intensively in export markets.

Read their column here

Today Fredrik Sjöholm starts his new position as CEO of IFN. He succeeds Magnus Henrekson, who has been the CEO for the past 15 years. Fredrik Sjöholm is recruited from Lund University, where he held a position as a Professor of International Economics.

The Research Institute of Industrial Economics, IFN, was founded in 1939. It grew into Sweden's largest institute for applied economic research on issues relevant to trade and industry. Fourteen years ago, IFN started a project documenting its' history. One of the books written as a part of this project was Anders Johnson's Building Bridges and challenging conventions: IFN 1939 – 2012. The book has been revised by author and journalist Elisabeth Precht, former Communications officer at  IFN. The new book describes the years from 2012 to 2020.

Male same-sex couples are being discriminated against on the Portuguese rental market. This is shown by IFN researchers Niclas Berggren and Therese Nilsson and their co-author Filipe Gouveia in an article recently accepted for publication in the Journal of Housing Economics. The study has impacted Portugal: One of the Portuguese Parliament parties is bringing a discussion point to the national parliament on discrimination in the housing market, using the study to validate further the need to discuss the subject.

The researchers are conducting a field experiment on the rental markets in Lisbon and Porto. Read the study here.

The market economy often affects trust and tolerance in society, but the market economy can also lead to a lowering of tolerance. It can also drive antisemitic perceptions. These are the findings in Niclas Berggren and Therese Nilsson’s research. They are the authors of one of the chapters in this year’s Economic Freedom of the World Report. An annual report published by the Fraser Institute. The report presents data on the amount of economic freedom of the world.

On 28 August 2020, we were reached by the sad news that professor Assar Lindbeck has passed away. His contributions to Swedish Economic research and to the Swedish public debate are outstanding. For many years Assar Lindbeck was a researcher at IIES, Stockholm University, and since 1995  he divided his time between IIES and IFN. He was also a researcher at our predecessor IUI for two earlier periods.  He devoted his life to economic research. Only two weeks prior to his death, at the age of 90, a paper of his was accepted by the European Economic Review.

IFN is hosting the Labor and Finance Group conference on August 17th and 18th. Due to the pandemic, the conference will be all digital. The Labor and Finance Group is an initiative to bring together academics working at the intersection of finance, labor economics, and personnel economics.

Topics such as private equity buyouts and their effects on employee health, whether executives are short in supply or not,  and the impact on workers of firm-level uncertainty shocks will be discussed on Monday. On Tuesday research on ownership, control and careers, wealth shocks, workplace automation and corporate financial policy, and house price booms will be presented.

Niclas Berggren, IFN, has been awarded ”Reviewer of the Year” by Journal of Institutional Economics. The award is a recognition of Niclas' work in   reviewing contributions  submitted to the journal. Niclas is one of two prize winners, in addition to him the prize also goes to Frank Decker.