Publications

Instructional time is seen as an important determinant of school performance, but little is known about the effects of student absence. Combining historical records and administrative data for Swedish…

We propose a method to recover homothetic preferences from choice data with minor optimization or measurement errors. Our method allows for a more detailed graphical analysis to reveal subjects' prefe…

When and how do entrepreneurs sell their inventions? To address this issue, we develop an endogenous entry-sale asymmetric information oligopoly model. We show that lowquality inventions are sold dire…

For about seventy years, the Canadian Wheat Board (CWB) was one of the world’s largest export “single desk” state traders in agriculture, until it was deregulated in 2012 and stripped of its marketing…

We show that a common regulatory mandate in electricity markets that use location-based pricing that requires all customers to purchase their wholesale electricity at the same quantity-weighted averag…

The association between occupational status and health has been taken to reveal the presence of health inequalities shaped by occupational status. However, that interpretation assumes no influence of…

We build a public finance model that explains why voters vote for right-wing populists, and also under which conditions established politicians will adopt a right-wing populist policy platform. Voters…

We decompose the impact of trade reform on technology adoption and land use to study how aggregate changes were driven by reallocation versus within-farm adaptation. Using detailed census data coverin…

We report the results of a randomized controlled trial testing whether incentivizing physical exercise improves the academic performance of college students. As expected, the intervention increases ph…

This paper studies the effect of the 1918–19 influenza pandemic on fertility using a historical dataset from Sweden. Our results suggest an immediate reduction in fertility driven by morbidity, and ad…

This paper develops a stylized model of cross-border balancing. We distinguish three degrees of cooperation: autarky, reserves exchange and reserves sharing. The model shows that TSO cooperation reduc…

We estimate impacts of exposure to an infant health intervention trialled in Sweden in the early 1930s using purposively digitised birth registers linked to school catalogues, census fies and tax reco…

We find an inverted relation between a player's birthday and the likelihood of receiving the Ballon d'Or (awarded to the best football player in the world). We develop a multi-period skill formation m…

The Swedish employer paid payroll tax was reduced substantially for young workers in 2007, causing firms’ average social fees to depend on the age structure of their employees. Using pre-reform condit…

Using the World Management Survey method, we map and analyse management quality in Swedish primary care centres. On average, private providers have higher management quality than public ones. We also…

Religious beliefs and practices influence individual lives and societies in many ways. We study how religion affects self-assessed health, which in turn is important for both individual well-being and…

In this paper, we analyze how a suffrage reform in 1862/63 that shifted the de jure distribution of political power from landowners to industrialists affected Sweden’s industrialization and economic a…

We analyze an investor who delegates information acquisition and investment decisions to an agent. The investor cannot monitor the agent’s effort or information. Optimal pay schemes contain bonuses th…

Cross-country comparisons of entrepreneurship are difficult due to the lack of standard empirical definitions of entrepreneurship. Measures focusing on small business activity and self-employment sugg…

We propose a management career model where females face a gender-specific career hurdle. We show that female managers will, on average, be more skilled than male managers, since females from the low e…

Europe continues to lag behind the U.S. in venture capital (VC) activity and in the creation of successful startups, and has recently been surpassed by China. This is despite the fact that many Europe…

As cities increasingly become centers of economic growth and innovation, there is a need to understand their inner workings and organization in greater detail. We use ge-coded firm-level panel data at…

We estimate trends in global earnings dispersion across occupational groups using a new database covering 66 developed and developing countries between 1970 and 2015. Our main finding is that global e…

Board room quotas have recently received an increasing amount of attention. This paper provides novel evidence on firm performance from an exogenous change in female board participation in Sweden. We…

An increasing reliance on solar and wind power has raised concern about system ability to consistently satisfy electricity demand. This paper examines countries unilateral incentives to achieve supply…

By the late 1960s, real effective taxation of income from individual firm owner­ship in Sweden approached 100 percent. A series of tax reforms initiated in the late 1970s reversed this situation. This…

Timothy Snyder has suggested an interpretive framework of the Holocaust that runs counter to previous scholarly literature as well as to popular perception. Snyder’s central thesis is that the mass mu…

According to Swedish penal code, there is a “rebate” on all prison sentences before the 21st birthday. We exploit this age discontinuity to investigate how individuals respond to harsher punishments.…

We study the link between tax progressivity and top income shares. Using variation from large-scale Western tax reforms in the 1980s and 1990s and the novel synthetic control method, we find large and…

We compile data spanning the period 1900–2014 and up to 30 countries to study long-run patterns in the tax elasticity of top incomes. Our results show that top tax elasticities vary tremendously over…

Christmas is when people are expected to act selflessly for the well-being of others, but are people actually more altruistic at this time of the year? Responding to this question poses a challenge be…

A successful transformation to a carbon neutral energy system requires the correct investments in transmission and production capacity. In a zonal pricing electricity market, the one proposed by the E…

The paper studies how stock price misvaluation and financial frictions affect whether an acquisition occurs between or within industries and whether the acquirer pays in cash or stocks. I set up a mod…

While previous research examines how institutions matter for general life satisfaction and how specific institutions embodying equal rights for gay people matter for the life satisfaction of gays, we…

Sorting of high-ability workers is a main source of urban-rural disparities in economic outcomes. Less is known about when such human capital sorting occurs and who it involves. Using data on 15 cohor…

There is a need for a conceptual approach that, with reference to explicit micro-level mechanisms and processes of industrial dynamics, articulates the role and function of entrepreneurial experimenta…

The interplay between entrepreneurship and institutions is crucial for economic development; however, the view that institutions determine the extent to which entrepreneurial activity is productive is…

Social trust has been identified as a catalyst for reforms. We take the literature further in two ways. First, we make a fine-grained analysis of mechanisms through which social trust enables liberali…

It is imperative that the economies of the European Union become more entrepreneurial to promote innovation and economic growth. To achieve these goals, we propose a reform strategy with respect to (i…

We conduct a contest experiment where participants can invest in increasing both the mean and the spread of an uncertain performance variable. Subjects are treated with different prize schemes and in…

In this paper, we provide some descriptive statistics of the first twenty years of the WTO (World Trade Organization) dispute settlement. The database used in this paper was assembled by the authors a…

This paper addresses women's under-representation in top jobs in organizational hierarchies. We show that promotions to top jobs dramatically increase women's probability of divorce, but do not affect…

Recent studies document a 30-year decline in various measures of entrepreneurship in the U.S. Using detailed Swedish employer-employee data over the period from 1990 to 2013, we find young firms to be…

Several recent behavioral models of choice build on the idea that decision makers put more weight on attributes in which the available options differ more. We test this assumption in a controlled expe…

We nuance the widely held view that well-functioning institutions are the ultimate prerequisite for innovation and entrepreneurship. This is done by putting the spotlight on the role that formal and i…

In a radical school choice reform in 1992, Sweden’s education system was opened to private competition from independent for-profit and non-profit schools funded by vouchers. Competition was expected t…

This paper studies the effect of the firm-size distribution on the relationship between employment and output. We construct a theoretical model, which predicts that changes in demand for industry outp…

Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) has increased in importance over the last decades, globally as well as in Indonesia. We examine how such inflows of FDI affects value added in Indonesia. The effect is…

Close to 2 700 state-to-state investment agreements (IIAs) worldwide protect foreign direct investment (FDI) against host country policies. We analyze the design and implications of protection against…

I examine the effects of privatization, in the form of acquisitions, in the Swedish electricity distribution sector. As the majority of the distribution networks remained publicly owned, I use a synth…

Sweden is often described as a country where intergenerational social mobility is high, but research also shows that social mobility decreases the closer one gets to the extreme top of the income dist…

This paper presents evidence of how attitudes toward gender roles in the home and market are shaped by Hofstede’s six cultural dimensions. Children of immigrants in a broad set of European countries w…

Delegated contracting describes a widely observable agency mode where a top principal, who has no direct access to a productive downstream agent, hires an intermediary to forward a sub-contract with s…

Previous studies of policy responses to economic crises argue that crises may lead to more interventionist policy but also cause deregulation. The empirical evidence in previous studies is equally mix…

This study uses new data on Swedish national wealth over the last two hundred years to examine whether the patterns in wealth-income ratios found by Piketty and Zucman (2014) extend to small and less…

Can a democracy attract competent leaders, while attaining broad representation? Economic models suggest that free-riding incentives and lower opportunity costs give the less competent a comparative a…

Social trust is linked to many desirable economic and social outcomes. Using new data from a representative sample of 2,668 Swedish expatriates, we examine the robustness of high social trust in count…

This paper presents new estimates of wealth inequality in Sweden during 2000–2012, linking wealth register data up to 2007 and individually capitalized wealth based on income and property tax register…

The sharing economy (peer-to-peer based sharing or renting activities coordinated through community-based online services) is typically assumed to be closely related to social trust. The two sharing e…

We estimate the impact of the removal of a railway transportation subsidy on the local economies of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, exploiting the large regional variation in these one-time freigh…

The surplus that is created in a successful entrepreneurial venture is much higher than the profit corresponding to the risk-adjusted market rate of return. The part of the surplus that exceeds this l…

Sweden has a school voucher system with universal coverage and full acceptance of corporate providers. Using a value added approach, we find that students at upper-secondary voucher schools on average…

We analyse how the Bosman ruling changed the incentives for football clubs in the European Union (EU) to develop talents. We show that the stiffer bidding competition over star players after the Bosma…

This paper investigates the intergenerational transmission of health in the very long run. Using a unique purpose-built administrative dataset on individuals born in Sweden between 1930–34 and their p…

This paper investigates the potential of an infant intervention to improve life expectancy, contributing to emerging interest in the early life origins of chronic disease. We analyse a pioneering prog…

A large and growing empirical literature has presented evidence of job polarization, i.e. the simultaneous growth of high-wage jobs and low-wage jobs at the expense of middle-wage jobs. Thus far, the…

This study examines the role of institutional environment in influencing the migration of corporate governance best practice into 22 emerging African economies.  Using a unique and comprehensive sampl…

We use new population-wide register data on inheritances and wealth in Sweden to estimate the causal impact of inheritances on wealth inequality. We find that inheritances reduce relative wealth inequ…

Even though the World Trade Organization (WTO) ensures equal access to the dispute settlement system, the legal process is still highly costly, an aspect that primarily affects poorer developing count…

High levels of social trust has been linked to both public sector size and long term economic growth, thereby helping to explain how some countries are able to combine high taxes and relatively high l…

Although institutional reforms are necessary to increase rates of entrepreneurship in European countries, we argue that one-size-fits-all reform strategies are unlikely to be successful. Reform strate…

I study the link between taxes and youth self-employment. I make use of a Swedish reform, implemented in 2007–09, which suddenly made the payroll tax and the self-employment tax vary by age. The resul…

We survey the literature on the economic consequences of the structure of social networks. We develop a taxonomy of `macro' and `micro' characteristics of social interaction networks and discuss both…

Over the past two decades, the U.S. stock market has halved in size as the “public firm model” has begun to fall out of favor. We develop a political economy model of delistings from the stock market…

This paper analyses the short- and longer-term effects of retirement on mental health in ten European countries. It exploits thresholds created by state pension ages in an individual-fixed effects ins…

This paper presents an empirical test of the anticompetitive effects of joint ownership by examining the operation of three nuclear plants in Sweden. Since maintenance is the main conduit explaining v…

Health assessments correlate with health outcomes and subjective well-being. Immigrants offer an opportunity to study persistent social influences on health where the social conditions are not endogen…

We use rich data on all business, economics, and engineering graduates in Sweden to study the lack of women among CEOs. A comprehensive battery of graduates’ characteristics explains 40% of the gender…

This paper shows that in online car auctions, resellers are better at appraising the value of the cars they are bidding on than are consumers. Using a unique data set of online car auctions, I show th…

Welfare services are an important part of the Nordic welfare states both financially and for welfare state redistribution. Baumol’s cost disease, Wagner’s law, and population ageing are often said to…

We analyze the effect of ICT and R&D on total factor productivity (TFP) growth across different industries in Sweden. R&D alone is significantly associated with contemporaneous TFP growth, thu…

The purpose of this study is to measure the sensitivity of trade volumes and unit values to agricultural productivity shocks at home and abroad. We find that the unit values of trade flows vary systemat…

This study estimates the impact of financial deregulation on top income shares. Using the novel econometric method of constructing synthetic control groups, we show that the "Big Bang"-deregulations i…

The VC sector is interesting both in its own right and as a proxy for entrepreneurial finance in a broader sense. We highlight the tax treatment of stock options as an important factor for variations…

We construct a multi-country employer-employee data to examine the consequences of employment protection. We identify the effects by comparing worker exit rates between units of the same firm that ope…

Evasive entrepreneurs innovate by circumventing or disrupting existing formal institutional frameworks. These evasions rarely go unnoticed and usually lead to responses from lawmakers and regulators.…

We use a dynamic oligopoly model of entry and exit with store-type differentiation to evaluate how entry regulations affect profitability, market structure and welfare. Based on unique data for all re…

There is great variation in views on and treatment of minorities such as gay men across the world. We are the first to pinpoint what features of societies that are beneficial to gay men’s quality of l…

The paper provides a framework for analysis of remuneration to agents whose task is to make well-informed decisions on behalf of a principal, with managers in large corporations as the most prominent…

We analyze how market design in.uences the bidding behavior in multi-unit procurement auctions where suppliers have uncertain costs and are uncertain about the availability of production units, as in…

Electricity markets are becoming more integrated around the world. However, the knowledge of the effects of different auction formats on suppliers’ strategies in the presence of transmission constrain…

As computer science and complex network theory develop, non-cooperative games and their formation and application on complex networks have been important research topics. In the inter-firm innovation…

Prior literature shows that choices regarding board composition are associated with earnings management. We add to this literature by examining the effects of the presence of a foreign board member on…

We consider a procurement auction, where each supplier has private costs and submits a stepped supply function. We solve for a Bayesian Nash equilibrium and show that the equilibrium has a price insta…

Online Appendix We study the effect of wealth on labor supply using the randomized assignment of monetary prizes in a large sample of Swedish lottery players. We find winning a lottery prize modestly…

This paper examines how consumers react to the financial distress of durable goods manufacturers by looking at the Swedish new car market. We employ a difference-in-differences matching methodology wh…

We estimate the causal effect of wealth on stock market participation using administrative data on Swedish lottery players. A $150,000 windfall gain increases stock ownership probability among pre-lot…

Failure to express minority views may distort the behavior of company boards, committees, juries, and other decision-making bodies. Devising a new experimental procedure to measure such conformity in…

Building on a framework introduced by Chaney and Ossa (2013), we construct a task-based model of the firm’s choice of occupational inputs to examine how that choice varies with greater global engageme…

We explore the potential effects of the first leaders of Sub-Saharan Africa. We first outline a set of theoretical reasons for why leaders may matter particularly at the critical juncture of African i…