Publications

This paper examines the identity and origins of Swedish inventors prior to World War I drawing on the universe of patent records linked to census data. We document that the rise of innovation during S…

We study the heterogeneity of family firms using registry data on all private firms in Sweden. We restrict our sample to firms with at least one employee, and we define a family firm as a firm where t…

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…

We study how sourcing of applied and basic knowledge is related to the likelihood and speed at which inventions become innovations as well as their profitability. By using a patent database with uniqu…

We study multi-unit auctions where bidders have single-unit demand and asymmetric information. For symmetric equilibria, we identify circumstances where uniform-pricing is better for the auctioneer th…

We investigate the returns to cognitive ability in the labor and capital markets. Using population-wide Swedish military enlistment data and administrative tax records, we find that cognitive ability…

A new empirical study examines whether advancements in automation and robotics have affected intergenerational income mobility. The authors find that parents’ exposure to new technologies is associate…

The market for labor is crucial in many respects. Nearly all persons interact with it throughout much of their lives. Moreover, individuals make significant life choices and substantial investments in…

Chinese investment abroad has grown significantly in connection with the Belt and Road Initiative. This article tries to answer two questions: first, what considerations gave birth to the BRI? And sec…

In this study, we examine the relationship between within-firm pay inequality and employee productivity. We use hand-collected data on a sample of S&P 1500 companies from 2018-2022 and find a conc…

Is technology or trade driving increases in wage inequality? We propose that technology interacts with trade in the form of foreign direct investments to widen domestic wage inequality. We show that f…

We study the relationship between adult education and training (AET) and employment in Sweden. Exploiting rich data from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, and using…

I study how firms adapt to exogenous changes in labor costs induced by collective bargaining agreements. I use data on collective bargaining agreements in Sweden and study the impact of the nationwide…

Based on resource dependence theory we argue for an influence of business groups (BGs) on the board composition of constituent offshore financial multinational enterprises (FMNEs).  Using a unique sam…

Does quality information affect international trade? We show theoretically how firms, in the absence of trustworthy information, may restrict their export activity. Exploring bilateral export flows ac…

Ideological spillovers refer to the modification of an individual’s core beliefs after learning about other people's beliefs.  We study one specific international ideological spillover, namely, the ef…

We exploit exogenous variation arising from the historical rollout of the Swedish railroad network across municipalities to identify the impacts of improved transport infrastructure on innovative acti…

Populists argue for redistribution from an elite to "ordinary people". The present paper asks if populist administrations actually achieve redistribution. Combining new data on populism in Latin Ameri…

Social trust is typically measured using surveys that ask people if they agree that most people can be trusted. A potential problem is that falling response rates plague these surveys. If non-response…

The application of machine learning (ML) to big data has become increasingly important. We propose a model where firms have access to the same ML, but incumbents have access to historical data. We sho…

Software is at the core of digitalisation and is often claimed to play a central role in innovation and in shaping competition across industries and firms. There are yet few studies of the extent and…

In the concluding chapter, the editors take stock of the state of integration seventy years after the EU’s inception. In the early 2020s, the EU faces once again the fateful question of whether integr…

The sixth volume in the Interdisciplinary European Studies assesses the changes that are taking place in the EU’s policies, institutions, and political structures. On the eve of a new chapter of Europ…

In this report to the Expert Group on Public Economics (ESO), which was previously published in Swedish (2022:3 Samspel för stabilitet), the balance between fiscal and monetary policy in Sweden is ana…

Despite the relatively uncontested importance of promoting school attendance in the policy arena, little evidence exists on the causal effect of school absence on long-run outcomes. We address this qu…

Against a backcloth of tumultuous events in Europe, the EU faces once again the fateful question of moving towards a federal union or letting flexible integration guide the Union. The sixth volume in…

Research indicates that education quality – measured by test scores in international student surveys – predicts economic growth. In this paper, we extend previous findings up to 2016 and analyse test…

A set of legal rules in liberal democracies guarantee freedom for individuals to shape their own lives. This study investigates whether such rules suffice to make people satisfied with the freedom the…

This paper aims to find country-level factors that explain the rise of populist parties in European democracies. While populism is often connected to inequality, we note that right-wing populist parti…

Nine out of ten modern constitutions contain explicit emergency provisions, describing who can call a state of emergency (and under which conditions) and the additional powers government enjoys under…

This paper examines how experience from working in a foreign owned firm affects worker mobility. International experience can provide a worker with knowledge about foreign operations, thereby making t…

Complete financial markets allow countries to share their consumption risks internationally, thereby creating welfare gains through lower volatility of aggregate consumption. Using a panel of 116 coun…

We study the impact of financing constraints on corporate risk management. Using data on credit scores matched with unique information on firm level commercial insurance purchases, we find that financ…

This paper examines whether advancements in automation and robotics have affected intergenerational income mobility. Using detailed data on all individuals and firms in Sweden from 1985 to 2017, we an…

Developing countries have 1300+ investment treaties with developed countries. Investment treaties are often alleged to constrain developing country climate policies. This paper examines four treaty re…

This paper explores whether coups cause increased crisis risk, and if some types of coups are associated with stronger risk. I use a worldwide sample with data on more than 1200 onsets of economic cri…

This chapter presents the evolution of national wealth in Sweden from 1810 to 2020. The historical period spans agricultural and industrial eras as well as the postwar emergence of a globalized servic…

Bonds play a major role in government and corporate finance and have done so for several centuries. The bond market consists of two parts. In the primary bond market, states, local governments and pri…

This book is the third volume in the research project coordinated by Sveriges Riksbank, Historical Monetary and Financial Statistics for Sweden. The first volume, published in 2010, dealt with exchang…

Motivated by a recent setback in the fight against child malnutrition, this study explores whether aid projects help to reduce stunting, or impaired growth, among children in the local area. Focusing…

We highlight a new factor behind integration: tolerance in the immigrants’ background culture. We hypothesize that it is easier to partake of economic, civic-political, and social life in a new countr…

We use population administrative data from Sweden to study adherence to 63 medication-related guidelines. We compare the adherence of patients without personal access to medical expertise to the adher…

Previous research suggests that high-trust societies tend to write short constitutions. We document that this pattern is not specific to the entire constitution, but is equally reflected in the emerge…

The Houtman-Maks index is a measure of the size of a violation of utility maximizing (i.e., rational) behavior. This note introduces the Stata command hmindex, which calculates the Houtman-Maks index…

The book is the third in a series of three books on financial history and focuses on the historical development of property prices in Stockholm, in a series that extends back to the Middle Ages. This…

This paper uses Labor Force Survey data for European countries to estimate national investment in data assets, where the asset boundary is extended beyond that for software and databases as currently…

The war in the breadbasket of Europe, which spawned at the heels of the once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, sent major cereal prices spiralling upward. The unprecedented sequence of events leading to and inc…

In a representative democracy politicians should either implement policies that voters want or policies that politicians believe are in voters long-term interest, even if voters currently oppose them.…

Spatial variations in rates of new firm formation are large and spatially persistent over long periods of time. A common explanation of this empirical regularity is so-called local entrepreneurship cu…

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 files and tax rec…

The creation and scaling of startups are inherently linked to risk-taking, with various types of owners handling these risks differently. This paper investigates the influence of an active venture cap…

It is unclear whether democracies or autocracies are more likely to silence or control the media when facing attempt at overthrowing the government. Our estimate of the dynamics of press freedom sugge…

We investigate whether bank loans specifically designed to reduce credit constraints for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have different impacts depending on where the firm is located. Using…

This study aims to explore how to deanonymize cryptocurrency money launderers with the help of machine learning (ML). Money is laundered through cryptocurrencies by distributing funds to multiple acco…

Although there is abundant evidence on individual preferences for policies that reduce national inequality, there is very little evidence on preferences for policies addressing global inequality. To i…

The editors-in-chief of the Annals of Regional Science offer an overview and analysis of recent developments at the journal from January 2020 through December 2021, a time period hampered by the COVID…

The mobility of workers from multinational enterprises (MNEs) to other local firms is increasingly recognized as an important externality mechanism. However, MNEs have strong incentives to curb this m…

A vast economic literature examines the welfare gains and distributional consequences of economic reforms, while much less is generally known on the relationship of inequality and forced regime change…

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…

The choice of language affects how and what we learn. Domestic conditions are easier to describe in one’s native language, and therefore have more room to breathe when discussed in the native language…

This paper addresses the competing views by studying Sweden, a country with a dramatic growth in the number of MOCs since the 1970s. We examine the association between the number of MOCs, citizen sati…

Professors and researchers in the Philippines compete within a global arena of science and scholarship. To do so, they use English, even when English is not their native language. Do those who play th…

We show how symmetric equilibria emerge in general two-player contests in which skill and effort are combined to produce output according to a general production technology and players have skills dra…

Many governments introduced temporary adjustments to counter the economic and health consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. We study the importance of already existing government transfers and pandemi…

We provide plausibly identified evidence for the role of investor disagreement in asset pricing. Our natural experiment exploits the staggered implementation of the Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis…

Wage employment is the most commonly observed type of employment after a spell of entrepreneurship. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of having been an entrepreneur on earnings a…

We study the effects of patent scope and review times on startups and externalities on their rivals. We leverage the quasi-random assignment of U.S. patent applications to examiners and find that gran…

This paper studies the effect of emigration on technological change in sending lo- cations after one of the largest migration events in human history, the mass migration from Europe to the United Stat…

An increasing number of researchers, whether in Sweden, Slovakia, Italy, Japan, Brazil, or many other places, are using English in their discourse, written or oral, despite working in a place where th…

An increasing number of researchers, whether in Sweden, Slovakia, Italy, Japan, Brazil, or many other places, are using English in their discourse, written or oral, despite working in a place where th…

Based on a review of 700+ peer-reviewed articles since 1990, identified using text mining methodology and supervised machine learning, we analyze how neo-Schumpeterian growth theorists relate to the e…

Amidst considerable debate on the relationship between entrepreneurship and economic inequality, scholarship only indirectly addresses how entrepreneurship informs individuals’ relative well-being. We…

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

In 2014, the Swedish government introduced a specific kind of R&D tax relief, reducing firms’ payroll tax liability for R&D staff. In comparison to traditional tax incentives where all qualifi…

We present estimates of the number of refugees expected to flee Ukraine and to which countries they are expected to migrate based on migration preferences data from the Gallup World Poll. This is impo…

Chinese investment abroad has grown significantly in connection with the Belt and Road Initiative. This article tries to answer two questions: first, what considerations gave birth to the BRI? And sec…

The European Commission’s Directive on minimum wages aims to ensure an adequate minimum wage for all workers in the Union and thereby counteract poverty among the low paid. This article examines the u…

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

In the late 1990s, Sweden had a uniquely well-functioning electricity system. It was virtually 100 per cent fossil-free, reliable, and cost-efficient. What went wrong?

In this paper, we study the link between globalization of firms and gender inequality. Specifically, we examine how the need for interpersonal contacts in trade and gender-specific differences in nego…

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…

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 f…

Agroecology has been proposed as a strategy to improve food system sustainability, but has also been criticised for using land inefficiently. We compared five explorative storylines, developed in a st…

Much political conflict in the world revolves around the issue of how much freedom to accord people. Liberal democracies are characterized by, e.g., the rule of law and a strong protection of civil ri…

We estimate a substantial female grade gain when being graded anonymously compared to male students in 101-macroeconomics courses. Females graded anonymously are more likely to continue with economics…

Leaf-thin bracteate coins were minted for several hundred years during the Mid[1]dle Ages. The existence of hundreds of small independent currency areas with their own mints in central, eastern and no…

Differentiating various types of entrepreneurs provides clues to the puzzle of why top-down policies often fail to create Schumpeterian entrepreneurship and the ecosystems where it thrives. Schumpeter…

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…

We study the mental health of PhD students in Sweden using comprehensive administrative data on prescriptions, specialist care visits, hospitalizations, and causes of death. We find about 7% (5%) of P…

Certain markets are illicit because part of the supply is coerced, but little is known about the optimal regulation of such markets. We model a prostitution market with voluntary and coerced prostitut…

Entrepreneurship research has documented the importance of institutions but has not considered it as a multi-stage process. We therefore consider both nascent and realized entrepreneurship, finding th…

The meritocratic fairness ideal implies that inequalities in earnings are regarded as fair only when they reflect differences in performance. Consequently, implementation of the meritocratic fairness…

I evaluate the effect of the 2011 Swedish electricity market splitting reform on the allocation of wind power, exploiting a unique data set of all Swedish applications for wind power since 2003. By co…

The COVID-19 pandemic has not only caused millions to die and even more to lose their jobs, it has also prompted more governments to simultaneously declare a state of emergency than ever before enabli…

William J. Baumol was one of the most prolific economists of his generation, analyzing a broad range of central economic issues addressing real problems of the world. In this essay, we present and cri…

The association between social trust and economic growth is well-documented but how it works remains an open theoretical and empirical question. The paper uses growth accounting to break down sources…

Some of the most contested questions in political science and political economy revolve around the conditions under which democratization is likely to happen and when democracy becomes a stable instit…

This study presents an improvement of the King-Fullerton framework for calculating the marginal effective tax rate (METR) for active owners of closely held corporations in a dual income tax system wit…

In the context of Sweden, we show that having a doctor in the family raises preventive health investments throughout the lifecycle, improves physical health, and prolongs life. Two quasi-experimental…