Publications

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…

This essay argues that the most crucial institution of any school system is the embraced view of knowledge—from which virtually all other aspects of a school are derived: the content of its curricula,…

How does people’s ability influence their taxpaying behavior? This column links administrative tax and military enlistment registers in Sweden to measure how cognitive ability matters for income tax r…

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…

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…

On the question of economic justice, political debate tends to swing between two poles. The Left wants to reduce economic differences based on the notion of distributive justice, while the Right empha…

We investigate the effect of technology adoption on competition by leveraging aunique dataset on production, costs, and asset characteristics for North Sea upstream oil & gas companies. Relying on…

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 examined customer and worker discrimination against gay and lesbian business owners using a web-based experiment conducted at a Swedish university campus. Participants (N = 1,406) were presented wi…

Little is known about self-employment as a career choice for women who marry a highincome spouse. We show that Swedish women who are married to a high-income spouse are, on average, highly educated an…

Immigrant integration is key to realizing the potential of international migration in economic development. However, integration is often thought to be hampered by immigrants' limited social networks…

The mixed-demand model allows for very flexible specification of what should be considered endogenous and exogenous in demand system estimation. This paper introduces a revealed preference framework t…

The concluding chapter reviews the EU’s handling of current crises and its search for sustainability and resilience. Beginning with its response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing public health…

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…

This chapter introduces the theme of the book—resilience in the EU. It presents definitions for these concepts and explores what the challenges of societal resilience entail for the EU. It is argued t…

Recent research has highlighted the contribution that managerial decisions make to firms’ productivity. This column uses a novel measure of job-worker allocation quality to document how firms that mat…

The institutional literature suggests that long-term tax incentives are crucial for entrepreneurs, but studies on this topic are hampered by theoretical and empirical problems related to how to define…

Previous research has indicated that constitutionalized emergency provisions effectively constrain the behaviour of democratic governments subsequent to terrorist attacks. In this article, we ask if t…

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…

The fifth volume of the Interdisciplinary European Studies series aims to explore the EU’s pursuit of societal resilience and its role in the transition to a green economy. It brings together scholars…

This paper studies the sensitivity of long-run trends in top income shares to differences in top-share measures. While the standard measure fixes a share of the population, we define alternatives that…

Among contemporary economists, Mariana Mazzucato stands out for her emphasis on the importance of innovation to solving pressing challenges and achieve a greater quality of life. However, the type of…

We analyze changes in the willingness to substitute from prescribed pharmaceuticals to more affordable generic equivalents in response to the first experience with a substitution. Using Swedish indivi…

The issue of what explains differences in the wealth of nations is one of the most classic in economics. We propose de facto academic freedom as an explanatory variable. The main idea is that such fre…

We present a novel measure of job-worker allocation quality (JAQ) by exploiting employer-employee data with machine learning techniques and validate it in various ways. Our measure correlates positive…

Patent value indicators are used to identify technological innovation. The probability of innovation correlates positively with patent renewal and patent family size, but only weakly with forward cita…

Formal institutions, e.g., regulations, are considered crucial determinants of entrepreneurship, but what enables regulatory change when there is a regulatory void, meaning entrepreneurship clashes wi…

We study shareholder support for corporate board nominees before and after the 2018 California gender quota. Pre-quota, new female nominees received greater support than new male nominees, consistent…

Starting from the '90s, Swedish manufacturing output has been constantly growing, while emissions of some major air pollutants have been declining. This paper decomposes manufacturing pollution emissi…

The advantages of multinational enterprises (MNEs) over domestic firms have been widely acknowledged in several streams of literature. However, a more refined analysis on the sources of their advantag…

In most democracies, members of parliament (MPs) are elected either through a party list or by a district. We use a discontinuity in the German electoral system to investigate the causal effect of a d…

This open access book examines the challenges and issues caused by a move to a marketized education system in Sweden. Observing the introduction of the school voucher system and a postmodern social co…

Many currencies, especially from countries with negative net foreign assets, depreciate during financial turbulence. Using a panel of 26 currencies for the period April 2002 to December 2019, I show t…

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…

This paper reports results from a classroom dictator game comparing the effects of three different sets of standard instructions. As was shown by Oxobyand Spraggon (2008), inducing a feeling of entitl…

In this paper, we study the role of risk-sharing in entrepreneurship-driven innovation. Studying entrepreneurship and innovation entails modeling an occupational choice and an effort choice. Risk-shar…

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 paper surveys the literature relevant for comparing centralized and decentralized wholesale electricity markets. Under a centralized design, producers submit detailed cost data to the system oper…

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…

It is often assumed that there is a trade-off between civil rights and national safety although the association is theoretically ambiguous. This article therefore explores this association by estimati…

This chapter comprises three main parts. The first part is about data sources, the definitions of income, and the methodologies used to estimate top income shares. Both the standard sources and method…

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…

Nine out of 10 constitutions contain explicit emergency provisions, intended to help governments cope with extraordinary events that endanger many people or the existence of the state. We ask two ques…

The 2020 Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research has been awarded to Professor John Haltiwanger. John Haltiwanger has made significant contributions to the field of entrepreneurship by improving ou…

While there is almost unanimous consent among scientists that climate change is real and has detrimental consequences, there is a sizable number of people who are skeptical towards these propositions…

Previous studies have stressed the role of a child's family environment for future political participation. This field of research has, however, overlooked that children within the same family have di…

We used an experiment to investigate whether people’s decisions over employment opportunities are affected by the ethnicity and sex of their potential future coworkers. University students (N = 1,406)…

Constructing football fields in Sweden with artificial turf has grown in popularity in recent years. Although the increase in playing time per year is a significant benefit of using artificial turf, t…

This study evaluates the impact of conventional cage bans for laying hens in the EU on exports of poultry-keeping equipment. Using detailed data on international trade in poultry-keeping equipment com…

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…

Economic growth requires factor reallocation across firms and continuous replacement of technologies. Labor market institutions influence economic dynamism by their impact on the supply of a key facto…

Based on historical analogies, we emphasize a connection between financial crises and technological shifts that calls for a structural economic transformation. Political pressures related to this stru…

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…

As a recent literature has demonstrated, men and women differ in their willingness to sort into competitive environments. In particular, men are more willing than women to compete. We investigate whet…

The basic policy tool for increasing FDI is international investment agreements (IIAs), state-to-state treaties that protect FDI against host country policy measures. This note focuses on the IIA of m…

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…

The significance of supply chain collaboration, communication and data exchange along with the importance of the relationships established among interconnected parties in a digital connected world, in…

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…

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…

We study whether the onset of the COVID-19 crisis affected the program choices of high school applicants in Sweden. Our analysis exploits the fact that the admission process consists of two stages: a…

Ceding ownership to outside investors provides a control dilemma for founders. In less developed capital markets with weaker formal institutions, we argue that retained founder director ownership can…

Innovation often takes place in entrepreneurial ecosystems. We use the history of the Silicon Valley venture capital model and the Hollywood motion picture industry to illustrate how specialized insti…

Multinational firms (MNEs) are key actors in the global economy, accounting for more than one-fifth of global output and more than two-thirds of global trade (Qiang et al., 2020). Moreover, approximat…

Wealth inequality has attracted considerable attention in recent years. This column presents new historical evidence that revises earlier results and reveals long-term patterns. A key finding is that…

In this paper, we study a new channel to explain firms’ price-setting behavior. We propose that uncertainty about factor prices has a positive effect on markups. We show theoretically that firms with…

This paper investigates the explanatory power of social convention theory for explaining the persistence of female genital cutting (FGC) in a broad sample of African countries. While influential in po…

While there is almost unanimous consent among scientists that climate change is real and has detrimental consequences, there is a sizable number of people who are skeptical towards these propositions…

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…

In this study, we derive a poverty-minimizing allocation rule, based on which we assess the poverty-efficiency of actual aid allocations, with a special focus on the comparative impact of new donors a…

This paper examines how changes in product market concentration, specifically firm exit, affect prices. I develop a model where firms have variable markups to show that the remaining firms increase th…

We analyze household-level changes in alcohol consumption in response to pregnancy. Using scanner data, we identify households with a pregnant household member. Within an event study and a dynamic dif…

We analyze optimal redistribution in the presence of labor market signaling where innate productive ability is not only unobserved by the government, but also by prospective employers. Our model featu…

I read books in recurring cycles, by subject. The first subject is Economics, then History, followed by Music and Art. Each cycle is concluded with Other, which is anything else, including fiction. I…

We estimate how labor force participation among married women in Sweden responded to changing work incentives implied by a reform in the tax and transfer system in 1997. Using rich, population-wide, a…

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…

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…

We argue that so-called geographies of discontent work within regional hierarchies in a spatial continuum, whereas the previous literature has mainly invoked dichotomous divides, such as core-peripher…

This paper analyzes new evidence on long-run trends in aggregate wealth accumulation and wealth inequality in Western countries. The new findings suggest that wealth-income ratios were lower before Wo…

This chapter reflects on the role of wage policies in facilitating the labour market integration of immigrants. The overall analysis in this chapter suggests that minimum wage cuts, combined with othe…

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

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…

Innovation often takes place in entrepreneurial ecosystems. We use the history of the Silicon Valley venture capital model and the Hollywood motion picture industry to illustrate how specialized insti…

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…

Several behavioural models of choice assume that decision makers place more weight on attributes where options differ more, an assumption we test in a set of experiments. We find that subjects are mor…

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 not t…

Throughout the Western world, power has come to be seen as something that should be restricted at all costs, because increasingly power is associated with coercion, fraud, ruthlessness, and violence.…

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…

I explore the association between the severity of lockdown policies in the first half of 2020 and mortality rates. Using two indices from the Blavatnik Centre’s COVID-19 policy measures and comparing…

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…

In this paper, we analyze the effect of transport infrastructure investments in railways. As a testing ground, we use data from a new historical database that includes annual panel data on approximate…

Among contemporary economists, Mariana Mazzucato stands out for her emphasis on the importance of innovation to solve pressing challenges and achieve a greater quality of life. However, the type of mi…

The issue of what explains differences in the wealth of nations is one of the most classic in economics. We propose de facto academic freedom as an explanatory variable. The main idea is that such fre…

A common coinage policy in the Middle Ages was ‘periodic recoinage’. Old coins were declared invalid and had to be exchanged for new ones at specified exchange rates and dates. This convention was a t…

Based on historical analogies, we emphasize a connection between financial crises and technological shifts where the shift calls for a structural economic transformation. We discuss how political pres…

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…

What is the effect of coups d’état on repression? Do ‘bad’ coups against democracies decrease respect for physical integrity rights? Does it make a difference whether a coup d’état is staged by the mi…

We use data on estate divisions to study to whom altruistic preferences are directed. Insofar bequests are given without the prospect of future personal benefits in mind, they are presumably intrinsic…

Since the 1990s, the Swedish education market has gone through a dramatic transformation due to the introduction of voucher-funded independent schools. We make use of data on school applications to co…