Research Reports and Articles

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…

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…

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…

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…

Water is an increasingly scarce resource. It is often distributed such that consumers do not face any marginal cost of consumption, creating a common pool problem. For instance, tenants in multi-famil…

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…

All organizations need to allocate labor to production and administration. In many cases – particularly within the public sector – the optimal allocation is far from obvious. Indeed, vocal concerns ha…

We study the causal effects of previous experience and language skills when newly arrived refugees in Sweden apply for job openings by means of a field experiment. Applications were sent from randomly…

In 2009, Sweden launched a freedom-of-choice reform that gave municipalities the option to introduce standardized quasi-markets in social services. The reform was initially popular to adopt in home ca…

This essay argues that mainstream Left and Right parties’ convergence around the liberal moral foundations of care, fairness, and liberty most likely explains the popular discontent with establishment…

Using the World Management Survey method, the authors mapped and analysed management quality in Swedish primary care centres. On average, private sector providers were better managed than public provi…

We use micro data on affiliates to Swedish multinational firms (MNEs) to explore the impact of more stringent employment protection legislation (EPL) on foreign direct investment (FDI). We add to the…

This paper studies the determinants of economies of scope and quantifies their impact on the extensive and intensive product margins in retail. We use a framework based on a multiproduct technology to…

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…

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…

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…

Digitaliseringen innebär att vi konsumerar och producerar varor och tjänster på nya sätt, men skattesystemet har inte följt utvecklingen. Flera länder redan har infört en digital skatt och därmed ökat…

We review the literature on public sector outsourcing to explore if the theoretical predictions from the incomplete contracts literature hold up to recent empirical evidence. Guided by theory, we arra…

Public sector outsourcing, in the form of private production of tax-financed services, is on the increase with economic and social consequences for consumers, taxpayers, and employees. The development…

The Swedish school system suffers from profound problems with teacher recruitment and retention, knowledge decline, and grade inflation. Absenteeism is high, and psychiatric disorders have risen sharp…

We study a reform by which a standardized model of choice and competition was introduced in tax-financed home care in a majority of Swedish municipalities. The market for home care is of particular in…

We measure labor productivity in home care using new data from the recent introduction of digital time measurement in Swedish municipalities. By measuring worker utilization (delivered hours as a shar…

Welfare effects of entry regulations are theoretically ambiguous in differentiated product markets. We use a dynamic oligopoly model of entry and exit with store‐type differentiation and static price…

We construct multi-country employer-employee data to examine the consequences of last-in, first-out rules. We identify the effects by comparing worker exit rates between different units of the same fi…

We study whether independent-school competition involves a trade-off between pupil wellbeing and academic performance. To test this hypothesis, we analyse data covering pupils across the OECD, exploiti…

The potential for institutional arrangements such as financial incentives and other market mechanisms to undermine intrinsic, moral motivation among both “producers” and “consumers” of tax-financed we…

Aim To study (a) the covariation between patient reported experience measures (PREMs) and registered process measures of access and continuity when ranking providers in a primary care setting, and (b)…

This paper investigates two hitherto unexplored dimensions inherent in online sequential auctions, namely, how the time elapsed between the end of an auction and the end of the next one and the order…

We show that house prices in general did not respond to a substantial cut in the national property tax in Sweden. The estimates are based on rich register data covering more than 100,000 sales over a…

The hospitality industry is a rapidly growing revenue generator in many countries and is becoming economically important for generating employment and for integrating of immigrants into the labor mark…