Working Papers 1975–1989 (WP001–WP255)

It was early noted that the Phillips Curve explanation of wage dynamics lacks a solid microeconomic basis. As the explanatory unemployment variable in the Phillips relation is intuitively to be regard…

Firms having significant shareholdings in one another is not an unusual phenomenon in countries where the law admits such ownership arrangements, like Sweden and Japan. In this paper the role of cross…

This paper studies the relative importance of tax incentives as merger motives in the Swedish industry during the period 1983-1987. Several econometric models are estimated and statistical tests perfo…

A general method is described which allows a production activity to be analyzed by means of input data only. According to duality theory, the input cost shares can be completely specified without any…

State subsidies to R & D or innovative investments in firms are organized in many different ways. Examples from the plethora of extant subsidy instruments are tax incentives, grants to researchers…

Over the course of the last 10 or 15 years there appears to be taking place a fundamental shift in the "industrial paradigm" governing the nature of competition in advanced industrial markets. Among t…

This paper reviews a growing literature investigating how economic agents may learn rational expectations. Fully rational learning requires implausible initial information assumptions, therefore some…

In a market with information costs, i.e., a search market, the equilibrium formation of prices and outputs will differ significantly from that of a purely competitive market. The equilibrium will be e…

To efficiently realize a specified goal in a distributive fashion, there needs to be an appropriate "division of labor." This is true for distributive algorithms that take advantage of the concurrent…

State subsidies to R & D or innovative investments in firms are organized in many different ways. Examples from the plethora of extant subsidy instruments are tax incentives, grants to researchers…

Sweden has for a long time spent large resources on labor market policies targeted to the unemployed. In the Anglo-Saxon labor economics literature new methods have been developed for the purpose of e…

Stylized facts indicate that small firms are responsible for a disproportionate share of innovative research. There are many possible explanations for this facto The paper seeks to understand this phe…

This paper utilizes data from a Swedish household survey for 1984 (The HUS data) in combination with data on public daycare fees and spaces per child by community. We argue that the subsidy rate and a…

To assess the merits of the market for corporate control, this paper examines two processes which standard analysis does not study: the allocation of economic competence and the evolution of organizat…

The lead theme of this essay asserts that a model of economic growth has to be explicit about the market dynamics of firm behavior. Firm dynamics originates in innovative behavior and in the price and…

This paper is concerned with ownership organization in the process of industrial growth and transformation. It stresses the difficulties of changing an established and successful pattern of behavior.…

When firms possess unique R & D assets such as ideas or particular researchers, and there are aggregate increasing returns to scale in R & D, then there can be several Nash equilibria involvin…

Bounded rationality provides a fundamental economic explanation for non-rational modes of behavior. These non-rational modes underlie both the erratic perturbations of entrepreneurship and the systema…

This paper examines the impact of financial market imperfections on long-term productivity growth. It focuses on failures in markets for the sale of equity securities and hence on the failure of marke…

Results from empirical studies of firm behavior are synthesized into, a theory of the firm as a competent team. I demonstrate the existence of a tacit organizational competence exercising a leverage o…

This paper presents some analyses of what would be the outcome of a price formation process in the presence of information costs. First, we examine the equilibria which obtain in search markets where…

In a world with multinational companies (MNC's) changes such as those implied by the realization of EC's internal market will affect the locational choice made by geographically mobile MNC's. The reas…

This paper shows that plant and firm size in manufacturing, and especially in engineering industry, in several Western industrial countries has declined since the early 1970s. Two hypotheses explainin…

This paper concerns the design of a trading mechanism for a group of traders when their valuations of the good are private information and they bargain over who shall consume more than his initial end…

The multinational firm (MNF) is introduced as the intersection between trade theory and the theory of the firm. I show that economies of scale associated with various knowledge inputs have made it pos…

The present paper has two aims. The first one concerns primarily an issue of method. I set up and analyse an explicitly stochastic model of the optimal behaviour of a firm, which recruits from a searc…

The present study is a theoretical and empirical investigation into the aggregate wage dynamics of Swedish manufacturing. It contains three essential results: a rigorous search theoretical model of t…

Economic growth in the very long run is described by a multiple-phase, dynamic process with potentially complex dynamics during transitions between regimes. Technology is assumed to rest on a manageri…

Government subsidized industrial R & D stands for a large and increasing segment of the total R & D conducted. Yet very little is known about the effectiveness of such subsidies. This paper su…

An "incentive subsidy" policy for subsidizing private R & D is proposed that can be more efficient, from a social point of view, than subsidy policies in common use such as a "normal" subsidy poli…

Hedging transaction and translation exposures to exchange rate changes may increase the economic exposure of the firm and reduce the information value of firms' quarterly statements. In this paper hed…

This paper raises several issues concerning productivity analysis. An attempt is made to demonstrate the usefulness of a micro-based approach to productivity analysis which challenges some basic assum…

This paper presents a technique for qualitative comparative statics analysis in dynamic programming models. Let the value function v be the fixed point of a contraction mapping which depends different…

This paper introduces an experimental economy with boundedly rational agents that compete with local, and largely incommunicable industrial knowledge, in an international market environment with more…

Swedish Manufacturing Industry is said to be technologically and commercially in good shape. While Swedish wage levels were higher than in all industrial countries in the mid-70s, wages - expressed in…

Market competition is central to innovative activity, the diffusion process and macro-economic productivity growth. Productivity growth at all levels comes about through institutional reconfiguration…

The paper contains an analysis of a firm's optimal wage and recruitment policy, when the dynamic labor supply to the firm is specified as a Poisson distributed flow of job-applicants, whose reservatio…

In this article it is shown that when the effects of an increase in unemployment subsidies are studied in a general equilibrium framework, unemployment increases far less than in a "partial-partial" m…

Working Paper No. 166 is published as "Market and Nonmarket Service Production in Swedish Households" (author: Anders Klevmarken) in Gunnar Eliasson (ed.), The Economics of Institutions and Markets, I…

When studying incentives in different economic systems, traditional comparative economics focuses on comparing incentives within markets to incentives within hierarchies. Advantages of the former are…

The modern manufacturing firm competes with product quality improvements rather than cost efficient production of simpler products. R&D spending, marketing, availability of spare parts and service…