Publications

I examine the pricing behavior of municipal and private firms in the unregulated Swedish district heating market, characterized by geographically bounded local monopoly networks. Conditional on exogen…

This paper examines how automation shapes intergenerational income mobility. Using Swedish  register data on parents and children from 1985 to 2019, we study how parental exposure to robots at th…

Previous studies have treated economic crisis as causes of coup attempts but theoretical considerations suggest that coups may also cause crises. Across 200 coups in Latin America and the Caribbean be…

We study the wage effects of an expansion of for-profit preschools in Sweden, which followed after a reform in 2006 removed municipalities’ right to veto private entry. The expansion decreased prescho…

This study asks whether populism weakens civil society in a panel of 79 countries from 1970 to 2019. Greater right-wing populist representation in legislatures is associated with declines in civil-soc…

Populist parties have grown rapidly in popularity in most European countries, and are increasingly common in government coalitions. Analyzing 183 populist parties in 33 European countries from 1980 to…

Startups face a trade-off between short-term profitability and long-term growth. Their cash flows are said to follow a so-called J-curve. The shape of the curve depends on investors' financing capacit…

Professors Albert N. Link and Donald S. Siegel are the joint recipients of the 2026 Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research. Over several decades, their scholarship has fundamentally reshaped our u…

We analyze provider differences in preschool using linked worker–workplace data that span 20 years and that include the full population of municipal, for-profit and non-profit preschools in Sweden. We…

This article discusses welfare quasi-markets, a promising yet under-explored area of study in entrepreneurship research. Many countries have implemented quasi-markets to enhance entrepreneurship…

We examine whether culturally transmitted time and risk preferences help explain differences in preventive health care uptake. We combine individual-level survey data from 27 European countries with c…

Using data from 31 European countries, this paper shows that the adoption of consent-based sexual assault laws reduces fertility by about 4% relative to the mean. The decline appears to be driven prim…

This introduction to a special issue of the Journal of Comparative Economics presents seven studies of institutional change and places them in the wider literature. It is described how rules and norms…

This paper explores the impact of experience in foreign-owned firms on worker mobility, with a focus on Swedish companies acquired by foreign multinationals. We posit that international experience, by…

Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT are transforming how scientists conduct and validate research, offering promise as tools to improve scientific reproducibility. However, computational repr…

Capital income is known to increase income inequality when measured on an annual basis, but the role of personal capital income in long-run inequality is rarely studied. Theoretically, capital in…

This paper brings metaethical beliefs into Buchanan and Tullock’s constitutional calculus. A truth-commitment parameter captures how strongly citizens moralize politics. Stronger commitment can tighte…

As universities and journals set limits on AI in research, this paper argues that the rules may reflect politics inside academia. Researchers who gain less from AI may push for restrictions to reduce…

This paper examines how medieval Swedish minting authorities (1277–1540) appear to have maintained relative price stability despite repeated debasement and silver shortages. Written sources are scarce…

A strong rule of law correlates positively with trust in journalists, as robust legal institutions punish deceit and fraud effectively. The study identifies quality legal institutions as crucial for c…

Newly developed data show that after successful coups, there is a 42 percent chance that a new constitution is implemented. We explore these constitutions, and that military coup plotters tend to draw…

Coups d’états tend to lead to more repression as well as economic decline. Yet, because left-wing governments are often supported by organisations with potential for mass mobilisation, overthrowing le…

We examine how gender-based occupational sorting before the release of ChatGPT relates to predicted exposure to generative AI and its potential implications for the gender wage gap. Using Swedish admi…

The Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021 gave rise to an unprecedented number of emergency declarations across the world. Recent research shows that the transfer of substantial discretionary power to th…

Higher social trust weakens rule-following norms, letting civic types selectively violate overinclusive rules in harmless cases while obeying when violations cause harm. This generates flexible enforc…

Feminists have claimed that capitalism and ‘neoliberal reforms’ are associated with femicide. Employing a panel of 163 countries between 1990 and 2023, we find no significantly positive relationship b…

This paper combines individual-level data from the European Social Survey with indicators of economic, political, and social globalisation. We exploit variation in exposure to globalisation during ind…

Using data for 76 democracies since 2000, we show that populist parties are linked to weaker freedom-related institutions, especially when they align ideologically with legislative majorities. Right-w…

The study examines the reproducibility and robustness of 110 articles published in leading journals in economics and political science by reproducing the original results using the same data and code…

We provide evidence of a positive association between independent directors’ reputation incentives and the magnitude of the CEO pay gap, defined as the difference in compensation between the CEO and l…

Hayek's ”road to serfdom" is not about big budgets, it is about case-by-case discretion replacing general rules. A formal model shows crises tempt voters toward leaders promising swift, targeted actio…

The study examines how government venture capital affects SME growth and financing. Results show increased employment, higher sales, and improved access to both equity and bank credit, with strongest…

This paper extends the Aghion–Howitt growth model by adding an entrepreneurial commercialization stage and replacing known risk with ambiguity. Ambiguity shortens perceived rent horizons, curbing comm…

The study examines how an expansion of the highway network in Croatia contributed to increased tourism and reduced voter support for the country’s largest national conservative party in coastal munici…

This paper formalizes a tradeoff between experienced well-being and the refinement of wants. Drawing on Knight and Schopenhauer, it shows that pursuing higher standards raises the benchmarks against w…

Using matching methods across 117 countries, this article finds no evidence that large increases in economic globalization reduce five-year income growth for the middle class. Most effects are insigni…

This study examines how economic-political uncertainty during formative years affects adult tolerance. Using the World Uncertainty Index and European Social Survey, findings show that uncertainty, esp…

The European football (soccer) market increasingly funnels rents to superstar players and intermediaries while weakening competitive balance. We trace this dynamic to two forces: (a) technological inn…

Inequality-as-externality models can justify very high top tax rates. This paper shows those results lean on abstractions that mute top-end responses. Once entrepreneurship and its spillovers enter, h…

Our use of longitudinal register data combined with a unique survey allows us to offer a more comprehensive picture of rural self-employment than in previous studies. We find that self[1]employed in r…

Welfare services such as healthcare, elderly care, and education are key to ensuring quality of life generally, and vital for rural communities across urbanizing countries. While these sectors are lar…

This paper formalizes Buchanan’s "relatively absolute absolutes" as a game where citizens choose a neutral lottery rule or costly conflict. The rule is self-enforcing in ordinary politics because defe…

Firms relying on working capital raise prices following monetary tightening, and this paper demonstrates that the working capital channel plays a key role in partial and general equilibrium inflation…

We show that culturally transmitted individualism is an important determinant of working from home (WFH). Using individual-level data from the U.S. Current Population Survey (CPS) and the European Soc…

Vi undersöker hur mycket hushållen förändrar konsumtionen vid ett husprisfall. Ett isolerat husprisfall leder till små genomsnittliga konsumtionsförändringar, men varierar beroende på hushållens belån…

This paper is a methodological commentary that critically examines Begum, Grossman, and Islam (2018), which claims to identify gender bias in parental attitudes in rural Bangladesh using a randomized…

Government interventions can vary in ideological ways not fully captured by standard measures of economic freedom. This paper shows that growth effects of specific areas of the economic freedom index…

One of the key objectives of the EU's energy policy is to integrate the national electricity markets across Europe. However, effective integration requires that the system operators controlling the tr…

Despite significant circular migration flows historically and today, their economic impacts remain understudied. Using data on predominantly rural Swedish migrants who returned from the US during the…

Quasi-markets in the provision of public services are increasingly common but also highly contested. We formulate a conceptual framework based on economic theory to describe how quasi-markets differ f…

We explore the challenges facing the current academic training of economists in small European countries such as Sweden. The monolithic focus on publishing in the top-ve journals, which prioritizes m…

The neo-Schumpeterian growth models, which appeared in the early 1990s, have ostensibly reintroduced the entrepreneur into mainstream growth theory. However, we show that by ignoring genuine uncertain…

We examine immigrant self-employment in Sweden during 2011–2021 – a turbulent decade with a large influx of refugees into the country and the outbreak of the global COVID-19 pandemic. Four outcome var…

A majority of the world’s countries ban forms of blasphemous expressions, often arguing that such legislation is necessary to prevent conflicts and terrorism. We explore the association between types…

Uncertainty affects people in various ways. It is frequently found to hinder investment and production in the economic sphere. In this study, we examine the empirical relationship between uncertainty…

We develop a theory of optimal income and education taxation under asymmetric information between firms and workers. Our results show that a max–min optimal tax code can achieve predistribution by poo…

This paper provides a brief and accessible guide to the Marginal Value of Public Funds (MVPF) and offers some new perspectives on its application to the evaluation of tax policy. Specifically, the pap…

The privatization of state owned enterprises is on the agenda across the globe. Using Swedish data covering two decades, we show that productivity gains and headcount reductions are coupled with econo…

Developing countries have 1300+ investment treaties with developed countries. Investment treaties are often alleged to constrain developing country climate policies. This paper examines four treaty re…

We estimate the effect of drought on farm economic performance, examine the sensitivity of farms’ historical performance to drought conditions, and determine the effect of a future increase in drought…

For almost three decades, Professor Dean A. Shepherd has had a profound impact on scholarly developments within the international community of entrepreneurship researchers. His extraordinarily broad a…

We present novel evidence from the first correspondence study investigating the effect of individual non-cisgender signals in the housing market. In a preregistered trial, 800 fictitious letters were…

Using ESS data for 2002–22, we show that social trust boosts immigrant household income in Europe. For first-generation immigrants, inherited country-of-origin trust predicts income most strongly; for…

This article discusses welfare quasi-markets, a promising yet under-explored area of study in entrepreneurship research. Many countries have implemented quasi-markets to enhance entrepreneurship…

This study evaluated discrimination against children with Type 1 Diabetes Mellitus (T1DM) in Swedish sports clubs through a field experiment. Two fictitious fathers sent emails to 193 top-division clu…

We study optimal housing taxation in a Mirrleesian framework where individuals differ in both labor productivity and land ownership. Housing services are produced by combining scarce land with structu…

The discussion of the growth consequences of socialism has fulminated for a century, sparked off by the Calculation Debate in the 1920s and 30s, and has concerned the performance of the Soviet Union i…

Harald Dale-Olsen has written a stimulating article on the various ways in which trade unions affect labour markets. My comment will focus on the effects on productivity. In economics, this is perhaps…

This article reviews the various forms of pattern bargaining under which manufacturing, as the representative of the tradables sector, sets the norm for wage increases in the Nordic countries. Such ba…

Fifteen years ago, Bergh and Erlingsson (2009) argued that Sweden's period from 1980 to 2000 was characterised by “liberalisation without retrenchment”. This resulted from pragmatic policymaking, a co…

A common claim holds that investment treaties reduce the willingness of host countries to regulate foreign-owned, environmentally-stranded, investments. A counter-argument is that the treaties can yie…

This paper leverages a university-wide anonymous grading reform and presents evidence that female university students benefit from anonymous grading. Female grades improve by around 0.035 standard dev…

This study is an explorative examination of changes in employment, revenue, and firm structure for low, mid, and high-skill firms in urban and rural areas in Sweden from 2007-2019, using skill groups…

Islam (2019) reports results from a cluster randomized field experiment in Bangladesh that examines the effects of parent–teacher meetings on student test scores in primary schools. The reported findi…

In medieval Europe’s coinage systems, the introduction of small denomination coins was a significant challenge due to their higher relative production costs, often leading to shortages. To address thi…

The creation and scaling of startups are inherently linked to risk-taking, with various types of owners handling these risks differently. This paper investigates the influence of an active venture cap…

This paper examines how water filtration and distribution helped reduce mortality during a cholera outbreak. Using household water contract records and individual mortality data, I analyze the impact…

Can competition and the existence of profit-seeking actors in the school market improve educational quality? To see cost-efficient, long-term improvements, we identify the school system’s capacity for…

The net-zero agreement on carbon emission from Paris 2015 gives a key role to fossil-free energy technologies with an expected multifold growth rate over the coming decades, when successively replacin…

Terrorism causes anger and fear among citizens, but also often leads to counterterrorist legislation (CTL). We explore determinants of CTL and whether it affects the likelihood of terrorism and limits…

How does government ideology affect the size of government? This article employs data on government spending and regulation using a new disaggregation scheme and new causal strategy. It finds that gov…

Recently, the incentive structure facing doctoral students and researchers in economics has changed significantly in many European countries as a result of the adoption of the US approach to evaluatin…

We study how the presence of promotion competition in the labor market affects household specialization patterns. By embedding a promotion tournament model in a household setting, we show that special…

We develop a novel measure of job-worker allocation quality (JAQ) by exploiting employer-employee data with machine learning techniques. Based on our measure, the quality of job-worker matching correl…

We study the effects on firms that are acquired by private equity firms in a leveraged buyout, using detailed Swedish registry data covering 1998-2022. Acquired firms see a large increase in their deb…

Using Swedish-matched employer–employee data from 2001 to 2018 and parametric survival analysis, we examine how the share of off-farm wage income affects survival time in the state of hybrid farming.…

Since comprehensive data became available five years ago, a literature about academic freedom has emerged. This paper surveys studies on the causes and consequences of academic freedom. The new litera…

Ample evidence demonstrates that early-life adversity negatively affects morbidity and survival in late life. We show that disease exposure in infancy also has a continuous impact on reproduction and…

Little is known about how democratic process affects terrorism. We outline three mechanisms and test their implications in a large panel dataset of 76 countries. Voter turnout is associated with fewer…

This paper examines the identity and origins of Swedish inventors prior to World War I drawing on the universe of patent records linked to census data. We document that the rise of innovation during S…

We estimate the causal effects of parental incarceration on children’s short- and long-run outcomes using administrative data from Sweden. Our empirical strategy exploits exogenous variation in parent…

Many governments introduced temporary adjustments to counter the economic and health consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. We study the importance of already existing government transfers and pandemi…

This paper investigates the relationship between the log change in mobile broadband latency and total factor productivity (TFP) growth based on data for 130 countries. It finds that there is a strong…

There is widespread concern, especially in certain feminist circles, that a market-oriented economic system, or capitalism, disfavors women. This could take many forms, such as lower wages for the sam…

This study provides a comprehensive analysis of the generational wealth transfer within Sweden’s public pay-as-you-go pension system introduced in 1960. Using extensive administrative registers, the p…

This article analyzes new evidence on long-run trends in aggregate wealth accumulation and wealth inequality in Western countries. The new findings suggest that wealth-income ratios were lower before…

Academic freedom is a cornerstone of modern academic life. It is not only implied by basic liberal principles but also contributes to scientific progress and economic growth. It is therefore important…

We review the theoretical justification for consumption taxes in advanced economies, providing a systematic review of the extensive public finance literature that examines how goods and services shoul…