Publications

This essay argues that mainstream Left and Right parties’ convergence around the liberal moral foundations of care, fairness, and liberty most likely explains the popular discontent with establishment…

There is scant systematic empirical evidence on what explains variation in academic freedom. Making use of a new indicator and panel data covering 64 countries 1960–2017, we investigate how de facto a…

Many electricity markets use capacity mechanisms to support generation owners. Capacity payments can mitigate imperfections associated with “missing money” in the spot market and solve transitory capa…

This paper evaluates the impact of entry regulations on stores’ incentives to adjust product variety and long-run performance. We use rich Swedish data on stores, product categories, and local regulat…

In the wake of the Covid-19 crisis, the European Union must regain lost ground and create more favorable conditions for inclusive and sustainable economic growth. The best way to achieve this goal is…

Sweden faces a major challenge in the next decades because of a projected increase in electricity demand, aging supply infrastructure and the transition to an energy system with a substantial share of…

We construct an oligopolistic model with heterogeneous firms where new automation technologies displace workers. We show that both leading and laggard firms increase their productivity when automating…

Relying on Swedish linked employer-employee data over a 30-year period, I study the importance of work during high school for graduates’ school-to-work transition and labor market outcomes. I show tha…

For the past decade, the sharing economy has not only grown but also expanded to cover a wide variety of different activities across the globe. Despite a lot of research, there is still no agreement o…

This paper studies the behavior of competing firms in a duopoly with rational inattentive consumers. Firms play a sequential game in which they decide to obfuscate their individual prices before compe…

We show that the anticipation of COVID-19 vaccines reduces voluntary social distancing. In a large-scale preregistered survey experiment with a representative sample, we study whether providing inform…

We study the economic and psychological effects of a USD 1076 PPP unconditional cash transfer, a five-week psychotherapy program, and the combination of both interventions among 5,756 individuals in r…

It is well known that capital constraints can hinder individuals to set up a business. Many business owners rely on own capital or capital from friends, fools and family in order to acquire required c…

Thirty years ago, the Swedish tax system underwent a major reform. Since then there have been many changes to the tax system, and the general level of tax revenues has declined by over five percentage…

Several studies have linked rising insolvency rates to increasing inequality and argued that this might be explained by individuals’ desire to “Keep up with the Joneses”. Using unique administrative r…

This study investigates the role of retail pharmacy ownership in the opioid epidemic in the United States by comparing independently owned pharmacies’ and chain pharmacies’ prescription opioid dispens…

This paper evaluates an ambitious and newly designed program for increased integration in Sweden. The purpose of the program is to help newly arrived, low-educated refugees into employment. The progra…

This paper provides a comprehensive study on how attending a Swedish independent upper secondary school, instead of a public school, affects students’ academic and short-term post-secondary outcomes.…

Motivated by agency theory and arguments from linguistic studies, we argue in this paper the internationalization of a firm’s audit committee to be associated with weaker firm-level corporate governan…

In this paper, we use a randomized field experiment in Sweden to investigate how self-employment experience is valued in the labor market. We find that self-employment experience negatively impacts th…

Intrapreneurs, entrepreneurial employees, constitute an important force behind innovations in the economy. Yet, what factors that promote intrapreneurship at the country level are an underdeveloped re…

Researchers increasingly recognize that entrepreneurial employees, intrapreneurs, play a critical role in innovation. As with regular entrepreneurship, however, the value of intrapreneurial activity d…

This article estimates a dynamic structural model of firm R&D investment in twelve Swedish manufacturing industries and uses it to measure rates of return to R&D and to simulate the impact of…

This study investigates whether exposure to peer depression in adolescence affects own depression in adulthood. We find a significant long-term depression peer effect for females but not for males in…

We develop a theoretical model in which technology adoption decisions are based on the information received from others about the quality of a new technology and on their risk attitudes. We test…

Economic theory predicts that outsourcing public services to private firms will reduce costs, but the effect on quality is ambiguous. We explore quality differences between publicly and privately owne…

We use the random allocation of graders to different exam questions at Stockholm University to evaluate the existence of same-sex bias in exam correction. We find evidence of same-sex bias before anon…

We study ethnic differences in long-term self-employment in Sweden combining population-wide register data and a unique survey targeting a large representative sample of the total population of long-t…

This is a study of the relationship between business group ownership and constituent firms’ adoption of Anglo-American shareholder value governance in African firms at the undertaking of an initial pu…

We study the role of capital requirement in immigrants’ self-employment decision with the help of a reform implemented in Sweden in 2010 which reduced capital requirements for limited liability compan…

Recent experimental evidence suggests that noisy behavior correlates strongly with personal characteristics. Since decision noise leads to bias in most elicitation tasks, there is a risk of falsely in…

We examine how variation in antisemitism across countries can be explained by economic freedom. We propose two mechanisms. First, the more economic freedom, the greater the scope of market activities.…

There are good reasons to expect that citizens will appreciate local government more than central government. Sure enough, previous studies have found support for this assumption. Nevertheless, I will…

The strong negative relationship between geographical distance and trade is not well understood. I use the liberalization of the Soviet airspace to estimate the causal impact of business tra…

Previous research indicates that firms pay a premium to poach workers from exporting firms if experience working for an internationally engaged firm reduces trade costs. Since international experience…

Across the globe, local governments have increasingly begun to rely on municipally owned corporations (MOCs) to provide public services, mounting to what scholars describe as a burgeoning corporatizat…

Using longitudinal Swedish data, we document robust evidence of highly local spillovers between individuals in similar occupations. The results are consistent with the existence of knowledge spillover…

In a ’smart’ electricity distribution network, flexible distribution resources (FDRs) can be coordinated to improve efficiency. But coordination enables whoever controls such resources to exercise mar…

In this paper, we quantify hateful content in online civic discussions of politics and estimate the causal link between hateful content and writer anonymity. To measure hate, we first develop a superv…

The purpose of this study is to present a unique database on commercialized patents and to illustrate how it can be used to analyze the commercialization process of patents. The dataset is based on a…

Standing at 24% in 2018, India’s female labour force participation is only half of the global average (48%). At the same time, India has one of the widest gender wage gaps in the world and women are l…

Several scholars as well as industry professionals have claimed that there is a “software-biased shift” in the nature and direction of innovation in that software development is a core part of innovat…

There is debate among researchers regarding the importance of water filtration in reducing mortality during the epidemiological transition. However, there is limited research on how water filtration a…

We demonstrate how successful entrepreneurship depends on a collaborative innovation bloc (CIB), a system of innovation that evolves spontaneously and within which activity takes place through time. A…

Limiting the spread of contagious diseases can involve both government-managed and voluntary efforts. Governments have a number of policy options beyond direct intervention that can shape individuals’…

We examine if international trade improves labor market integration of immigrants in Sweden. Immigrants participate substantially less than natives in the labor market. However, trading with a foreign…

The revealed preference approach in economics is central to the empirical analysis of consumer behavior. This paper introduces the Stata commands checkax, aei, and powerps as a bundle within the packa…

Inventors generally know more about their inventions than what is written down in patent applications. Because they possess this tacit knowledge, inventors may need to play an active role when patents…

This paper reports the results of a choice experiment designed to estimate the private welfare costs of stay-at-home policies during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study is conducted on a large and repres…

This paper investigates the impact of financial liberalization on the relationship between consumption and total wealth (i.e., the sum of asset wealth and human wealth). We propose a heterogeneous age…

In the aftermath of the Second World War, Sweden dismantled an education system that was strongly influenced by German, Neo-Humanist pedagogical principles in favor of a progressive, student-centered…

Drawing on our recent work on local effects of Chinese development projects in Africa, this review article highlights a number of distinguishing features of Chinese aid, and discusses how these may tr…

Recent empirical evidence suggests that Chinese development finance may be particularly prone to elite capture and patronage spending. If aid ends up in the pockets of political elites and their ethno…

This paper analyzes the determinants of the labor-capital split in national income for 20 countries since the late 1800s. Our main identification strategy focuses on unique historical quasi-experiment…

Within the field of innovation studies, researchers have identified systematic failures that hamper investment in R&D, innovation, and growth. Accordingly, researchers in this field often seek to…

We analyze the relationship between cognitive ability and bunching in the context of a large and salient kink point of the Swedish income tax schedule. Using population-wide register data from the Swe…

It is well-known that men and women differ in their views regarding the severity of climate change, but do they also differ in their support for climate policy and in undertaking climate action in the…

Politicians and international organisations advocate for increased regulation and government control of industry in order to handle climate change and reduce overall greenhouse gas emissions. However,…

We present results from a field experiment in which fictitious parents to children with certain types of disabilities, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1D…

The effect of minimum wages on employment is a matter of debate, and the existing empirical literature contains mixed results. One reason for this is the methodological difficulties involved where cha…

Consider a quasiconcave, upper semicontinuous and homogeneous of degree $\gamma$ function $f$. This paper shows that the reciprocal of the degree of homogeneity, $1/\gamma$, can be interpreted as a me…

We develop models for weakly separable utility maximization with incomplete adjustment. By allowing for incomplete adjustment, these models account for the decision maker’s inability to instantaneousl…

Using comprehensive data on 28 cohorts in Sweden, we analyze CEO health and its determinants and outcomes. We find CEOs are in much better health than the population and on par with other high-skill p…

This paper investigates price patterns of off-patent pharmaceuticals in Sweden. I show that price dynamics are dependent on the number of competitors in the market. The price patterns follow predictio…

This paper proposes a simple non-parametric framework to calculate income elasticities from a data set of observed prices and consumed quantities without having to estimate any parameters. The framewo…

The dominant ‘sand in the wheels’-view holds that entrepreneurship is strongly inhibited by corruption. Challenging this, the ‘grease the wheels’-view maintains that corruption might increase entrepre…

Entrepreneurship research suggests that entrepreneurship education and training can bridge the gender gap in entrepreneurship, but little empirical research exists assessing the validity and impact of…

We offer a rationalization of the weak axiom of revealed preference (WARP) and of the weak generalized axiom of revealed preference (WGARP) for both finite and infinite data sets of consumer choice. W…

In most democracies, members of parliament are either elected over a party list or by a district. We use a discontinuity in the German parliamentary system to investigate the causal effect of a distri…

We exploit exogenous variation arising from the historical rollout of the Swedish railroad network across municipalities to identify the impacts of lowered interaction costs on innovative activity. A…

We measure and analyze discriminatory behavior against same-sex couples trying to rent an apartment in Portugal. This is the first correspondence field experiment investigating discrimination against…

This article examines the market power of branded prescription drugs faced with generic competition. Using prescription-level and matched socioeconomic panel data of the entire Swedish population betw…

Digitaliseringen innebär att vi konsumerar och producerar varor och tjänster på nya sätt, men skattesystemet har inte följt utvecklingen. Flera länder redan har infört en digital skatt och därmed ökat…

In this paper, we estimate the causal effect of political power on the provision of public education. We use data from a historical nondemocratic society with a weighted voting system where eligible v…

Countries are alleged to pursue commercial interests through their antitrust interventions regarding FRAND commitments for standard-essential patents (SEPs). This paper examines pros and cons of alloc…

Entrepreneurship plays a pivotal role for institutional change and economic development in transition and developing economies. Formal and informal institutions in such countries are often sub-par, bu…

Individuals with ancestry from countries with advanced information technology in 1500 AD, such as movable type and paper, adopt the internet faster than those with less advanced ancestry. The analysis…

We ask whether, as many seem to think, corruption worsens, and judicial accountability improves, inequality, and investigate this empirically using data from 145 countries 1960–2014. We relate perceiv…

This paper proposes new power indices for revealed preference tests. The indices are based on a model of irrational consumption behavior where the consumer randomly allocates a certain fraction of exp…

The variability of solar and wind generation increases transmission network operating costs associated with maintaining system stability. These ancillary services costs are likely to increase as a sha…

For previously identified weakly separable blockings of goods and assets, we construct aggregates using four superlative index numbers, the Fisher, Sato-Vartia, Törnqvist and Walsh, two non-superlativ…

This paper uses a large-scale two-level randomized experiment to study direct and displacement effects of job search assistance. Our findings show that the assistance reduces unemployment among the tr…

We present the theory of the collaborative innovation bloc (CIB), an evolving system of innovation within which activity takes place over time. We show how the application of the CIB perspective can h…

In recent years, commercial banks have substantially reduced the number of their branch offices. We address the question of whether or not the increased distance to lenders caused by branch office clo…

Recent micro-level studies have suggested that globalization - in particular, economic globalization and trade with China - breeds political polarization and populism. This study examines whether or n…

We develop a model in which ethnic minorities can either assimilate to the majority's norm or reject it by trading off higher productivity and wages with a greater social distance to their culture of…

Although the linear-in-means model is the workhorse model in empirical work on peer effects, its theoretical properties are understudied. In this study, we develop a social-norm model that provides a…

Consequences of social trust are comparatively well studied, while its societal determinants are often subject to debate. This paper studies both in the context of Catalan attempts to secede from Spai…

We investigate two parallel school reforms in Sweden to assess the long-run health effects of education. One reform only increased years of schooling, while the other increased years of schooling but…

We examine the relationship between occupational automation probabilities and employment dynamics over nearly two decades. We show that employment and wage shares of occupations with a higher automati…

We estimate the impact of the 2012 removal of the Canadian Wheat Board’s (CWB) single-desk on the spatial pattern of durum wheat acres in Western Canada. We analyze changes in durum seeded acres with…

Correct estimates of import demand elasticities are essential for measuring the gains from trade and predicting the impact of trade policies. We show that estimates of import demand elasticities hinge…

We study whether a woman's labor supply as a young adult is shaped by the work behavior of her adolescent peers' mothers. Using detailed information on a sample of U.S. teenagers who are followed over…

We study how friendship shapes students' political opinions in a natural experiment. We use the indicator whether two students were exogenously assigned to a short-term \integration group", unrelated…

We estimate the direct and spillover effects of a large-scale early childhood intervention on the educational attainment of over 2,000 disadvantaged children in the United States. We show that failing…

This paper proposes a theory of gazelle growth in which gazelles can either grow organically or by acquisitions. In the model, there are three types of firms: incumbent, target, and gazelle. We show t…

Capacity mechanisms are increasingly used in electricity market design around the world yet their role remains hotly debated. In this paper, we introduce a new benchmark model of a capacity mechanism…

In recent years, the number of listed companies has been declining in many countries across the world. This paper provides a selective survey of the literature on the real economic effects of the stoc…

We assess the empirical literature on the determinants of spatial variations in new-firm formation rates by undertaking a systematic empirical analysis of the relative roles of different demand- and s…

In this study we examine the passage of a reform to in-vitro fertilization (IVF) procedures in Sweden in 2003. Following publication of medical evidence showing that pregnancy success rates could be m…