News

Ewa Lazarczyk Carlson, an affiliated researcher at IFN, together with scientists from 12 other universities, participates in a research study focusing on peoples´ attitudes and behaviours towards COVID-19 and the use of social media channels in acquisition of information regarding the virus.

 IFN is closely monitoring the situation regarding the coronavirus. We are following the recommendations of Swedish authorities. Our researchers and staff can be contacted via e-mail or phone.

All academic seminars in March are canceled. We will keep you informed about what happens later on this spring and will be acting according to the recommendations of Swedish authorities.

The prize award for the Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research is postponed until fall.

We will be adapting our planned policy seminars according to the recommendations of Swedish authorities and will be keeping you informed about which seminars will be canceled or postponed.

The new publication Europaperspektiv 2020, the 23rd annual volume, was presented at a seminar in Brussels on Tuesday. 

The 2020 Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research goes to John Haltiwanger, Professor of Economics at University of Maryland, USA. Haltiwanger is awarded for his pioneering research advancing our understanding of job creation and destruction, productivity growth, and the role of small business and entrepreneurial firms in economic development. The Global Award is the foremost international award in entrepreneurship research with a prize sum of € 100,000.

Professor John Haltiwanger has made significant contributions to the field of entrepreneurship by improving our understanding of job creation and destruction, productivity growth, and the role of small and medium-sized firms (SMEs) in economic development. He has played a major role in the careful development of large, longitudinal firm-level datasets, and introduced a novel and widely adopted measure of firm growth that addresses previous statistical biases. His work has influenced public policy and national statistical offices around the world.

Professor Haltiwanger’s most important contributions include:

• To question the conventional wisdom of the job creation ability of small business. He provides evidence that large and mature firms account for most of the newly created manufacturing jobs, and that these jobs are of higher quality than those in SMEs in that they are more likely to persist in subsequent years.
• To show the importance of firm age as opposed to size: the job creation in small firms takes place in the first few years of their existence, as captured in the “up-or-out” dynamics.
• The decomposition of productivity growth into contributions from continuing, entering, and exiting firms. He shows that the largest component of growth can be attributed to continuing firms improving their productivity over time.

The Award ceremony will take place in Stockholm on May 11. For further information, please visit our website, www.e-award.org.

Simon Ek, a Ph.D. student at Uppsala University and the IFN, and Magnus Henrekson, professor and director of IFN, are awarded a Prize for the best paper published in the Scottish Journal of Political Economy in 2019.

Joacim Tåg, Program Director for Globalization and Global Restructuring, has been awarded the title of Associate Professor ( Docent) in Economics at Lund University.

He works on bringing Swedish registry data to the research frontier in labor and finance. A central theme is the allocation of executives and workers across firms and/or into entrepreneurship.

His research is detailed in over 30 publications and working papers and has been featured in major national and international newspapers. It has over 1000 cites in Google Scholar and ranks top decile by all-time downloads worldwide in SSRN.

Read more about Joacim Tåg

On the 17th of August 2020, IFN will be hosting the first European conference of the Labor and Finance Group.The Labor and Finance Group is an initiative to bring together academics working at the intersection of finance, labor economics, and personnel economics.

On November 25, IFN celebrated 80 years of independent research with an anniversary seminar for specially invited guests. IFN Chairman of the Board Staffan Bohman emphasized the importance of fact-based analysis in his welcome speech:

- IFN has never had a more important task than today, as a factual voice in a debate and media climate where superficiality and fake news have become realities.

On Monday, IFN organized a seminar for a delegation from All-China Women's Federation. The federation is the leading organization for women's rights in China. Joacim Tåg presented his paper ”What Prevents Women from Reaching the Top?”

Magnus Henrekson, CEO of IFN, presented the book The Entrepreneurial Society – A Reform Strategy for the European Union, at ZEW – Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research in Mannheim.

Joacim Tåg, IFN, presented the paper "What Prevents Women from Reaching the Top?" at the Joint Bank of England, Federal Reserve Board and European Central Bank conference Gender and career progression, in Frankfurt am Main on Monday.

Associate professor Shon Ferguson presented his study about so called born globals at the National Board of Trade today.

On Tuesday, a delegation from the European Commission visited IFN to take part of Fredrik Heyman, Pehr-Johan Norbäck and Lars Persson's research on how digitization and automation have affected Swedish business and industry.

Gabriel Heller Sahlgren, IFN and the London School of Economics (LSE), has defended his thesis Causal Inference in Social Policy: Evidence from Education, Health and Immigration at the LSE. He passed his viva voce with no corrections, an unusual outcome in the UK system.

How can the EU become more inclusive, innovative, and achieve sustainable growth? According to Magnus Henrekson, Niklas Elert and Mark Sanders, Utrecht University, entrepreneurship is the answer. This is the message of their new book The Entrepreneurial Society: A Reform Strategy for the European Union. This was also their message when Elert and Henrekson presented their research at a lecture arranged by ESBRI, the Entrepreneurship and Small Business Research Institute.

The Italian economist Marco Pagano, University of Naples Federico II, visited the Research Institute of Industrial Economics this week. His area of expertise is Labor and Finance, an area that is central to IFN’s research program Globalization and Corporate Restructuring.

On Thursday Özge Öner, IFN and the University of Cambridge, received the Young Researcher Award 2019 for "significant contributions to our understanding of entrepreneurship," explained the chairman of the prize committee Martin Andersson, professor at Blekinge Institute of Technology. The prize sum is SEK 150,000 and is given every year, alternately to a man and a woman, by the Entrepreneurship Forum. "We try to understand what the place means for the economy and for, among other things, entrepreneurship," Öner explained in her prize lecture.

The EU needs reforms in six different areas for a more dynamic and competitive entrepreneurship, according to IFN:s Niklas Elert and Magnus Henrekson. They have co-authored the new book The Entrepreneurial Society: A Reform Strategy for the European Union with Mark Sanders, Utrecht University. Magnus Henrekson, CEO of the IFN, presented the book at a seminar open to the public at Näringslivets Hus on September 12th.

Magnus Henrekson, CEO of IFN, presenting the new book  The Entrepreneurial Society: A Reform Strategy for the European Union. Photo: Karl Gabor

How do Swedish taxes compare to other OECD countries? This is the topic of a report published by SNS.
Åsa Hansson, University of Lund and affiliated to IFN talked about the report at a seminar at SNS. Sweden, being a small country, needs to lower corporate taxes to be competitive on a global market, said Åsa Hansson.

Professor Magnus Henrekson, Managing director of IFN, has been appointed by the Government to propose who should be Chairman and further members of the Board of Lund University. He is one of two appointees that will give their suggestions for the operational period of May 2020 - April 2023. The other nominee is Maria Arnholm, former Minister of Gender Equality and the Liberals party secretary.