Journal Articles

I examine whether employment protection affects the willingness of working parents to provide childcare. Using a reform that made it easier for employers to dismiss workers in small firms, I find that…

We exploit close elections in Swedish municipalities to test whether relatives of politicians who become mayors obtain economic benefits. We find no benefits for the siblings of new mayors, but the av…

We investigate to what extent ICT and R&D capital is associated with value added growth in the Swedish business sector. By estimating output elasticities based on data for 47 different industries…

Income inequality in China has been much documented and debated. However, one important aspect of income inequality – social insurance inequality – has been largely understudied. We use a large nation…

Sweden has a school voucher system with universal coverage and full acceptance of corporate providers. Using a value added approach, we find that students at uppersecondary voucher schools on average…

Mergers give acquirers control over the assets of the merged entity and give sellers control over financial assets. We propose a cross-border merger model with home biased financially constrained owners…

We develop a model where party leaders choose the competence of politicians on the ballot to trade off electoral success against their own survival. The predicted correlation between the competence of…

Private equity firms are often criticized for laying off workers, but the evidence on who loses their jobs and why is scarce. This paper argues that explanations for job polarization also explain layo…

By the late 1960s, real effective taxation of income from individual firm ownership in Sweden approached 100 percent. A series of tax reforms has reversed this situation. This paper (1) elucidates the…

We examine how consumers react to the financial distress of durable goods manufacturers by studying the Swedish new car market. We employ a difference-in-differences matching methodology whereby we co…

What does the future hold for the welfare state? An assessment of its ongoing viability in the years to come, and challenge to the idea that it would – or should – be replaced in the foreseeable futur…

A specific monetary tax − called periodic re-coinage − was applied for almost 200 years in large parts of medieval Europe. Old coins were frequently declared invalid and exchanged for new ones based o…

An increasingly large share of cross-border acquisitions are undertaken by private equity-firms (PEfirms) and not by traditional multinational enterprises (MNEs). We propose a model of cross-border acqu…

The surplus that is created in a successful entrepreneurial venture is much higher than the profit corresponding to the risk-adjusted market rate of return. The part of the surplus that exceeds this l…

We analyze the effect of ICT and R&D on total factor productivity (TFP) growth across different industries in Sweden. R&D alone is significantly associated with contemporaneous TFP growth, thu…

In this empirical study, we investigate the variation in firms’ response to institutional pressure for gender-balanced boards, focusing specifically on the preservation of prevailing practices of dire…

We study the intergenerational transmission of cognitive and noncognitive abilities using population data and correct for measurement error in abilities using two sets of instruments. The results show…

In this article, we provide some descriptive statistics of the first twenty years of the WTO (World Trade Organization) dispute settlement., that we have extracted from the data set that we have put t…

We establish a correlation between the hierarchical structure of a firm and the likelihood of business creation among its former employees, using a sample of 16 million observations of Swedish workers…

We estimate the impact of individual principals on school outcomes by using panel data that allow us to track principals over time. We find that individual principals have a substantive impact on scho…

We document a substantial decline in cognitive and social interactive abilities and in GPAs among entering teachers. Then, using matched student-teacher data, we find that teacher abilities have a negl…

We analyze a reform of notice periods for employer-initiated separations in Sweden, which reduced the notice periods for newly hired older workers substantially but implied minor or no changes in the…

Swofford and Whitney (1987, 1988, 1994) investigated the validity of two key assumptions underlying representative agent models of macroeconomics. These assumptions are utility maximization and weak s…

We construct a task-based model of the firm’s choice of occupational inputs to examine how that choice varies with greater global engagement. We assume that more complex tasks are more costly to comple…

Despite the strong pace of globalisation, the distance effect on trade is persistent or even growing over time (Disdier and Head, 2008). To solve this distance puzzle, we use the recently developed gr…

Using detailed Swedish matched employer–employee data, I show evidence of within-firm job polarization. Applying a decomposition framework, I find that both within-firm and between-firm components are…

We extend the workhorse model of network competition to international calls. This model enables us to show that national regulatory authorities (NRAs) maximizing domestic welfare have incentives to in…

Many countries have undertaken central-bank independence reforms, but the years of implementation differ. What explains such differences in timing? This is of interest more broadly, as it sheds light…

This study examines the impact of the prevalence of long-term equity-based chief executive officer (CEO) compensation incentives on GDP growth, and we address the moderating role of individualist vers…

Based on a large-scale survey of Swedish firms, the authors identify significant heterogeneity in their attitudes towards refugee hiring, job performance, wage setting and discrimination, though exper…