Publications

This book explores the multiple challenges that the global technology shift is posing to the EU. It raises the question of how European societies will mobilize the positive effects of the rapid techno…

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…

Focusing on health care, education, and elderly care, Privatizing Welfare Services draws on extensive research on the consequences of introducing market-based mechanisms to deliver welfare services.

In this paper, we argue that altered incentives for clubs to develop star players after the Bosman ruling can explain why European football has seen lower competitive balance in the Champions League b…

Policymakers in several countries have recently taken steps to promote the rapid export expansion of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The goal of these policies has been to create successfu…

This article presents the results of a field experiment in which fictitious parents of children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1DM) sent inquiries…

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-superlati…

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…

Religion exerts a powerful influence on many people’s lives. We investigate how self-assessed religiosity affects self-assessed health in Europe. Our sample consists of individuals with a native fathe…

We exploit the randomized assignment of lottery prizes in a large administrative Swedish data set to estimate the causal effect of wealth on stock market participation. A $150,000 windfall gain increa…

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…

In the Middle Ages, tens of thousands types of uni-faced bracteate coins were struck in the period 1140−1520. The existence of hundreds of small independent currency areas with their own mints in cent…

The financial system channels resources from savers to investors. It helps firms to fund new investments and households to smooth consumption over time. It allows entrepreneurs to offload risk on outs…

The decision to outsource public provision of services is multifaceted and context dependent. Doing so tends to lower labor intensity and increase its efficiency. Costs are usually lower, but quality…

We evaluate the impact on earnings, pensions, and further labor market outcomes of two parallel educational reforms increasing instructional time in Swedish primary school. The reforms extended the an…

Does medicine run in families? Polyakova and colleagues have explored data from Swedish educational records, to see whether physicians had relatives that also trained as medical professionals. They al…

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…

Just as its constitutional development is characterised by frequent change and substantial concentration of power, the Latin American and the Caribbean area is known to host some of the most corrupt c…

In China, between 2006 and 2013, local public debt crowded out the investment of private firms by tightening their funding constraints while leaving state-owned firms’ investment unaffected. We establis…

We measure and analyze discriminatory behavior against same-sex couples trying to rent an apartment in Portugal and pay special attention to the role of religiosity. This is the first correspondence f…

This paper employs Swedish data on households' stock holdings to investigate how consumption responds to changes in stock market returns. We instrument the actual capital gains and dividend payments w…

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 the aftermath of the Covid 19 crisis, the business sectors in Sweden and Europe will need considerable restructuring and reorganization. These required changes add to the need to keep pace with the…

We estimate trends in global earnings dispersion across occupational groups by constructing a new database that covers 68 developed and developing countries between 1970 and 2018. Our main finding is…

This paper presents the results of a study that examined customer discrimination against fictitious male and female food truck owners with Arabic-sounding names on a Swedish university campus. In a we…

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…

The sharing economy (peer-to-peer based sharing or renting activities coordinated through community-based online services) is often said to be closely related to trust. This paper examines the associa…

Strict travel restrictions are preventing business partners from different countries from meeting in person. This column explores the effect of business travelling time on trade using data from the li…

We surveyed a large sample of Swedish lottery players about their psychological well-being 5–22 years after a major lottery event and analysed the data following pre-registered procedures. Relative to…

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

Lars Calmfors, IFN, writes about his views on the Swedish Covid strategy in Washington Post (also published in Anchorage Daily News). Lars Calmfors argues that we saved our economy, but too many peopl…

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…

We present a field experiment conducted in order to explore the existence of ethnic discrimination in contact with public authorities. Two fictitious parents, one with a Swedish-sounding name and one wi…

Recent data show that virtually all military dictatorships that democratize become presidential democracies. I hypothesize that the reason is that military interests are able to coordinate on status-p…

A large number of studies have analysed the role of individual and geographical determinants of voting behaviour in the context of the recent EU referendum in the UK, but several questions remain. A k…

Social trust is linked to both public sector size and to economic growth, thereby helping to explain how some countries combine high taxes with high levels of economic growth. This paper examines if s…

Has rising import competition contributed to the polarization of US politics? Analyzing multiple measures of political expression and results of congressional and presidential elections spanning the p…

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…

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…

This report is the first step in a research project with the intent to calculate the value added of as many schools as possible in Sweden. In the future, similar studies analysing other schools, both…

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…

Timor-Leste is going through turbulent times. On the political front, the old conflict between former prime ministers Mari Alkatiri and Xanana Gusmao continues to generate parliamentary reshufflings,…

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…

This study provides new empirical evidence regarding the relevance of evaluation criteria and firm characteristics for public R&D funding decisions. The database used contains both accepted and rej…

In a radical school choice reform in 1992, Sweden’s education system was opened to private competition from independent forprofit and non-profit schools funded by vouchers. Competition was expected to p…

This paper studies the incentives and characteristics of firms that apply for, and eventually receive, one or multiple governmental grants intended to stimulate innovation and growth. The analysis dep…

Using detailed census data covering over 30,000 farms in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, Canada, we document the vast and increasing farm size heterogeneity, and analyse the role of farm size in a…

We study the link between tax progressivity and top income shares. Using variation from Western tax reforms in the 1980s and 1990s and synthetic control method estimation, we find that reductions in t…

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 survey discusses how capital should be taxed in advanced economies. We review the theoretical optimal tax literature, survey empirical studies on the distribution of capital and the distortionary…

We develop a word‐of‐mouth search model where information flows from the old to the new generation for an experience good with unknown quality. We study the features of the social network that determi…

Capacity mechanisms are increasingly used in electricity market design around the world yet their role remains hotly debated. This paper introduces a new benchmark model of a capacity mechanism in a c…

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…

Recently, policy makers worldwide have suggested and passed legislation to ban mobile phone use in schools. The influential (and only quantitative) evaluation by Beland and Murphy (2016), suggests tha…

We investigate how the life satisfaction of migrants is affected by life satisfaction in their background country and in their new country of residence. In particular, we contribute to the literature…

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…

Zonal pricing with countertrading (a market-based redispatch) gives arbitrage opportunities to the power producers located in the export-constrained nodes. They can increase their profit by increasing…

Globalization affects the mix of jobs available in an economy and the rate at which workers gain skills. We develop a model in which firms differ in terms of productivity and workers differ in skills,…

Student mock elections are conducted in schools around the world in an effort to increase political interest and efficacy among students. There is, however, a lack of research on whether mock election…

We compile four hand-collected measures of high-impact Schumpeterian entrepreneurship (venture capital-funded IPOs, self-made billionaire entrepreneurs, unicorn start-ups, and young top global firms f…

Since the seminal paper of Hoffman et al. (1994), an entitlement effect is believed to exist in the Ultimatum Game, in the sense that proposers who have earned their role (as opposed to having it rand…

Wealth is highly correlated between parents and their children; however, little is known about the extent to which these relationships are genetic or determined by environmental factors. We use admini…

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…

Admission to high school in Sweden is based on the final grades from junior high. This article compares students’ final mathematics grade with new data from a high school introductory test score in math…

This briefing discusses the possible reactions of the European Union’s larger trading partners to carbon border measures. Section 1 discusses experiences of carbon border adjustment-like regimes prior…

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…

The purpose of this study is to measure the sensitivity of traded quantities and trade unit values to agricultural production shocks. We develop a general equilibrium model of trade in which productio…

We estimate the importance of inherited wealth in Sweden over the past 200 years. Inheritance is measured both as the annual inheritance flow divided by national income and as the share of inherited w…

We present results from a unique nationwide survey conducted in Sweden on sexual orientation and job satisfaction. Our results show that gay men are more likely to be very satisfied with their job tha…

The response to the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted global trade, investment and value chains. There is a risk that newly imposed barriers to international trade and mobility will become permanent. Re…

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…

For some time now, the research focusing on Knowledge Intensive Business Services (KIBS) has been very active. Observing that knowledge as a production factor is only becoming more and more pronounced…

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…