News

The new book Privatizing Welfare Services: Lessons from the Swedish Experiment, by IFN researchers Mårten Blix and Henrik Jordahl, is reviewed by professor Diane Coyle in her blog The Enlightened Economist.

Matilda Orth, IFN, and Florin Maican, affiliated to the IFN, have written a column on the dynamic impact of exporting on firm R&D investment in Vox EU. Together with their co-authors Mark Roberts, Pennsylvania State University, and Van Anh Vuong, Maastricht University, they use a structural framework to estimate the returns to innovation investments and analyze the impact of trade of those returns.

One of their conclusions is that the long payoff to R&D investment is higher for firms that are active and operate more intensively in export markets.

Read their column here

Today Fredrik Sjöholm starts his new position as CEO of IFN. He succeeds Magnus Henrekson, who has been the CEO for the past 15 years. Fredrik Sjöholm is recruited from Lund University, where he held a position as a Professor of International Economics.

The Research Institute of Industrial Economics, IFN, was founded in 1939. It grew into Sweden's largest institute for applied economic research on issues relevant to trade and industry. Fourteen years ago, IFN started a project documenting its' history. One of the books written as a part of this project was Anders Johnson's Building Bridges and challenging conventions: IFN 1939 – 2012. The book has been revised by author and journalist Elisabeth Precht, former Communications officer at  IFN. The new book describes the years from 2012 to 2020.

Male same-sex couples are being discriminated against on the Portuguese rental market. This is shown by IFN researchers Niclas Berggren and Therese Nilsson and their co-author Filipe Gouveia in an article recently accepted for publication in the Journal of Housing Economics. The study has impacted Portugal: One of the Portuguese Parliament parties is bringing a discussion point to the national parliament on discrimination in the housing market, using the study to validate further the need to discuss the subject.

The researchers are conducting a field experiment on the rental markets in Lisbon and Porto. Read the study here.

The market economy often affects trust and tolerance in society, but the market economy can also lead to a lowering of tolerance. It can also drive antisemitic perceptions. These are the findings in Niclas Berggren and Therese Nilsson’s research. They are the authors of one of the chapters in this year’s Economic Freedom of the World Report. An annual report published by the Fraser Institute. The report presents data on the amount of economic freedom of the world.

On 28 August 2020, we were reached by the sad news that professor Assar Lindbeck has passed away. His contributions to Swedish Economic research and to the Swedish public debate are outstanding. For many years Assar Lindbeck was a researcher at IIES, Stockholm University, and since 1995  he divided his time between IIES and IFN. He was also a researcher at our predecessor IUI for two earlier periods.  He devoted his life to economic research. Only two weeks prior to his death, at the age of 90, a paper of his was accepted by the European Economic Review.

IFN is hosting the Labor and Finance Group conference on August 17th and 18th. Due to the pandemic, the conference will be all digital. The Labor and Finance Group is an initiative to bring together academics working at the intersection of finance, labor economics, and personnel economics.

Topics such as private equity buyouts and their effects on employee health, whether executives are short in supply or not,  and the impact on workers of firm-level uncertainty shocks will be discussed on Monday. On Tuesday research on ownership, control and careers, wealth shocks, workplace automation and corporate financial policy, and house price booms will be presented.

Niclas Berggren, IFN, has been awarded ”Reviewer of the Year” by Journal of Institutional Economics. The award is a recognition of Niclas' work in   reviewing contributions  submitted to the journal. Niclas is one of two prize winners, in addition to him the prize also goes to Frank Decker.

The board of IFN has appointed Fredrik Sjöholm, professor of International Economics at Lund University as the new CEO of IFN. He replaces Magnus Henrekson who after 15 successful years has asked to leave his position.

The research program Economics of Electricity Markets changes its name to Sustainable Energy Transition. The new name offers a better description of the research now produced within the program.

The new book The Entrepreneurial Society – A Reform Strategy for Italy, Germany and the UK offers a unique toolbox for solving the innovation crisis in Europe. The tools might be even more relevant post-covid-19. Mikael Stenkula, IFN, is one of the authors.

Ewa Lazarczyk Carlson, an affiliated researcher at IFN, together with scientists from 12 other universities, participates in a research study focusing on peoples´ attitudes and behaviours towards COVID-19 and the use of social media channels in acquisition of information regarding the virus.

 IFN is closely monitoring the situation regarding the coronavirus. We are following the recommendations of Swedish authorities. Our researchers and staff can be contacted via e-mail or phone.

All academic seminars in March are canceled. We will keep you informed about what happens later on this spring and will be acting according to the recommendations of Swedish authorities.

The prize award for the Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research is postponed until fall.

We will be adapting our planned policy seminars according to the recommendations of Swedish authorities and will be keeping you informed about which seminars will be canceled or postponed.

The new publication Europaperspektiv 2020, the 23rd annual volume, was presented at a seminar in Brussels on Tuesday. 

The 2020 Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research goes to John Haltiwanger, Professor of Economics at University of Maryland, USA. Haltiwanger is awarded for his pioneering research advancing our understanding of job creation and destruction, productivity growth, and the role of small business and entrepreneurial firms in economic development. The Global Award is the foremost international award in entrepreneurship research with a prize sum of € 100,000.

Professor John Haltiwanger has made significant contributions to the field of entrepreneurship by improving our understanding of job creation and destruction, productivity growth, and the role of small and medium-sized firms (SMEs) in economic development. He has played a major role in the careful development of large, longitudinal firm-level datasets, and introduced a novel and widely adopted measure of firm growth that addresses previous statistical biases. His work has influenced public policy and national statistical offices around the world.

Professor Haltiwanger’s most important contributions include:

• To question the conventional wisdom of the job creation ability of small business. He provides evidence that large and mature firms account for most of the newly created manufacturing jobs, and that these jobs are of higher quality than those in SMEs in that they are more likely to persist in subsequent years.
• To show the importance of firm age as opposed to size: the job creation in small firms takes place in the first few years of their existence, as captured in the “up-or-out” dynamics.
• The decomposition of productivity growth into contributions from continuing, entering, and exiting firms. He shows that the largest component of growth can be attributed to continuing firms improving their productivity over time.

The Award ceremony will take place in Stockholm on May 11. For further information, please visit our website, www.e-award.org.

Simon Ek, a Ph.D. student at Uppsala University and the IFN, and Magnus Henrekson, professor and director of IFN, are awarded a Prize for the best paper published in the Scottish Journal of Political Economy in 2019.

Joacim Tåg, Program Director for Globalization and Global Restructuring, has been awarded the title of Associate Professor ( Docent) in Economics at Lund University.

He works on bringing Swedish registry data to the research frontier in labor and finance. A central theme is the allocation of executives and workers across firms and/or into entrepreneurship.

His research is detailed in over 30 publications and working papers and has been featured in major national and international newspapers. It has over 1000 cites in Google Scholar and ranks top decile by all-time downloads worldwide in SSRN.

Read more about Joacim Tåg