News

Andreas Bergh, IFN and Lund University, has revised and updated the book The capitalist welfare state (Studentlitteratur) which now is published in a fourth edition. Any news in the book? "In this edition I investigate the causal link between institutions and prosperity. I study for-profit companies in the welfare sector and address new research on problems in the Swedish school system and the importance of trust for the Swedish success," explains Andreas Bergh.

Early September researchers involved in the EU project Fires met in Berlin. The project involves nine research institutions in as many countries, IFN is one and London School of Economics is another. The researchers' task is to – based on solid research – propose policies that can make Europe more entrepreneurial. The projects will end in 2018. In Berlin entrepreneurs from several countries participated, including Birgitta Stymne Göransson, Chairman of Medivir AB.

"Aid on Demand: African Leaders and the Geography of China's Foreign Assistance" was the title of a study that Axel Dreher presented and discussed at a research seminar at IFN on Wednesday. Dreher is Professor of International and Development Politics at the University of Heidelberg in Germany.

"The European Central Bank is currently struggling to get inflation going again," states Dow Jones Newswire/Wall Street Journal refering to research by Roger Svensson, IFN, and Andreas Westermark of Sweden’s Riksbank. "Maybe it is time the ECB tried something a little bit more radical, something from the playbook of authorities from the Middle Ages: recoinage." Roger Svensson is the author of the extensive work "Renovatio Monetae – Bracteates and Coinage Policies in Medieval Europe".

In a new study, Niclas Berggren and Therese Nilsson, IFN, look at the effect of changes in economic freedom on tolerance in the United States. In comparing U.S. states they find that an increase in the willingness to let atheists, homosexuals and communists speak, keep books in libraries and teach college students is, overall, positively related to preceding increases in economic freedom, more specifically in the form of more general taxes.

August 6-7, a scientific workshop on the subject “economics of corporate ownership” was organized by the Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN). During two days in Vaxholm, just outside of Stockholm, specially invited researchers from Europe and the US discussed subjects related to the real economic effects of ownership forms and changes in ownership. In total, thirteen studies were presented.

Matti Keloharju, Professor of Finance at the Aalto University of Business and affiliated researcher at IFN, has been appointed to Academy of Finland Professorship for the years 2016-20. The Academy funds a number of five-year professorships which allow their holders to focus on research on a full-time basis. Professor Keloharju is the first business school professor ever to win this prestigious research grant. He will use his professorship primarily to collaborate with IFN researchers. He will be visiting Harvard Business School in the academic year 2015-16. 

Economic crises are the subject of a study by Christian Bjørnskov Professor at Aarhus University and affiliated to IFN. In a paper Bjørnskov examines how economic freedom affects economic crises. A high level of economic freedom proves to limit both the relative GDP decline and crisis recovery time, but has no effect on the duration of the crisis or the probability of a crisis.

The former Swedish Government launched Etableringsreformen, stipulating that refugees be placed in municipalities where there are job opportunities. Özge Öner and Johan Wennström, IFN, have analyzed where new arrivals are placed and find that it is in municipalities with a declining population and high unemployment – in other words where the conditions for job growth is weak. These findings and more are discussed in a podcast.

Thomas Tangerås, Associate Professor and Director of IFN’s research program Economics of Electricity Markets has been appointed Associated Researcher at The Energy Policy Research Group (EPRG), University of Cambridge. EPRG is considered one of the world's leading research institutions in the field of energy markets. Dr. Tangerås is the second IFN researcher to become affiliated to EPRG. Pär Holmberg was the first.
 

On 11–12 June, the Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN) organized the IFN Stockholm Conference, a two-day conference in Vaxholm, outside Stockholm, with researchers from Sweden, Austria, Denmark, the United States, the Czech Republic, Italy, France and Great Britain. The theme of the conference was “Culture, Institutions and Development”. The researchers, from various perspectives, discussed how informal institutions and culture is of importance to the economic development.

The 2015 Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research was awarded to Professor Emeritus Sidney G. Winter, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, at a ceremony in Stockholm on May 20. Prior to the ceremony Sidney Winter sat down with IFN-podcasts and answered questions about his research and what enticed him to go into research about entrepreneurship.

Listen when Professor Diane Coyle argues that we need new ways to measure the economy. In a new podcast she, an internationally renowned scholar in the debate on how we best define and measure national economies, traces the history of GDP and tells us why this measurement is increasingly inappropriate for a twenty-first-century economy. The lecture was given in Stockholm on May 7, 2015.

IFN is part of the brand-new European project Financial and Institutional Reforms for the Entrepreneurial Society (FIRES). The researchers' task is to – based on solid research – propose policies that can make Europe more entrepreneurial. The project involves nine research institutions in as many countries – IFN is one and London School of Economics is another. The project is funded by a grant of roughly SEK 25 million from the European Commission. FIRES will be launched at a kick-off in Berlin in early September.

The 2015 Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research has been awarded to Professor Emeritus Sidney G. Winter, The Wharton School, and University of Pennsylvania. At the ceremony in Stockholm Winter received 100,000 euros and a sculpture by Carl Milles. Among other things, he was awarded the prize for his studies of how technological change within companies influence renewal. In his lecture he explained how progress involves long series of changes and improvements to products and processes – all based on previous experience.

GDP is problematic as a measure of growth, but this does not mean that GDP is useless, explained Professor Diane Coyle, University of Manchester, in a seminar organized by IFN May 7. Coyle said that GDP is insufficient as a measure and what is probably needed is a dashboard of indicators. At the seminar, she mentioned a number of existing alternative measures, including Social Progress Index, which was created in 2014.

In the brand new book Swedish Taxation (Palgrave Macmillan, New York), Magnus Henrekson and Mikael Stenkula (editors) take a historical approach to taxation. Swedish Taxation examines the development of taxation in Sweden since 1862.

This historic tax project has been headed by Mikael Stenkula, IFN. Additional participants in the research team are Gunnar Du Rietz, Dan Johansson, Magnus Henrekson and Daniel Waldenström. The taxes studied are tax on work, capital, property, inheritance and gifts, goods and services and real estate.

Transparency and the difference between accurate and more information in corporate communications, was the subject of a half-day conference organized by the FAR, IFN, Nasdaq and Transparency International Sweden. Professor Sidney Grey, co-author of the book Oxford Handbook of Economic and Institutional Transparency, was a speaker at the event. In the final panel discussion, the participants agreed that the current scope of corporate information should not increase but should focus more on societal development.

On Wednesday a new book Real Finnish Lessons: The True Story of An Education superpower authored by Gabriel Heller Sahlgren, an affiliate of IFN, was launched by the Centre for Policy Studies, London. In the book Heller Sahlgren shows that it is primarily socio-economic and historical factors that gave rise to the results in Finnish schools, for example the PISA surveys. The most important lessons for Sweden and other countries, he says, are in the fields of educational culture and teaching methods.

The 2015 Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research is awarded to Professor Sidney Winter, Deloitte and Touche Professor Emeritus of Management at Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Global Award is the leading international award in entrepreneurship research with a prize amount of 100 000 Euros. Professor Winter is awarded for his profound understanding of dynamic competition, how a company's ability to assimilate innovations creates various technological opportunities and the mechanisms driving competence building in firms. The Global Award is presented by the Swedish Entrepreneurship Forum and IFN.