Publications

We present a field experiment conducted in order to explore the existence of ethnic discrimination in contact with public authorities. Two fictitious parents, one with a Swedish-sounding name and one wi…

Recent data show that virtually all military dictatorships that democratize become presidential democracies. I hypothesize that the reason is that military interests are able to coordinate on status-p…

A large number of studies have analysed the role of individual and geographical determinants of voting behaviour in the context of the recent EU referendum in the UK, but several questions remain. A k…

Social trust is linked to both public sector size and to economic growth, thereby helping to explain how some countries combine high taxes with high levels of economic growth. This paper examines if s…

Has rising import competition contributed to the polarization of US politics? Analyzing multiple measures of political expression and results of congressional and presidential elections spanning the p…

We analyze an investor who delegates information acquisition and investment decisions to an agent. The investor cannot monitor the agent’s effort or information. Optimal pay schemes contain bonuses th…

This study provides new empirical evidence regarding the relevance of evaluation criteria and firm characteristics for public R&D funding decisions. The database used contains both accepted and rej…

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…

This paper studies the incentives and characteristics of firms that apply for, and eventually receive, one or multiple governmental grants intended to stimulate innovation and growth. The analysis dep…

Using detailed census data covering over 30,000 farms in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, Canada, we document the vast and increasing farm size heterogeneity, and analyse the role of farm size in a…

We study the link between tax progressivity and top income shares. Using variation from Western tax reforms in the 1980s and 1990s and synthetic control method estimation, we find that reductions in t…

Inventors generally know more about their inventions than what is written down in patent applications. Because they possess this tacit knowledge, inventors may need to play an active role when patents…

This survey discusses how capital should be taxed in advanced economies. We review the theoretical optimal tax literature, survey empirical studies on the distribution of capital and the distortionary…

We develop a word‐of‐mouth search model where information flows from the old to the new generation for an experience good with unknown quality. We study the features of the social network that determi…

Capacity mechanisms are increasingly used in electricity market design around the world yet their role remains hotly debated. This paper introduces a new benchmark model of a capacity mechanism in a c…

Recently, policy makers worldwide have suggested and passed legislation to ban mobile phone use in schools. The influential (and only quantitative) evaluation by Beland and Murphy (2016), suggests tha…

We investigate how the life satisfaction of migrants is affected by life satisfaction in their background country and in their new country of residence. In particular, we contribute to the literature…

We present the theory of the collaborative innovation bloc (CIB), an evolving system of innovation within which activity takes place over time. We show how the application of the CIB perspective can h…

Zonal pricing with countertrading (a market-based redispatch) gives arbitrage opportunities to the power producers located in the export-constrained nodes. They can increase their profit by increasing…

Globalization affects the mix of jobs available in an economy and the rate at which workers gain skills. We develop a model in which firms differ in terms of productivity and workers differ in skills,…

Student mock elections are conducted in schools around the world in an effort to increase political interest and efficacy among students. There is, however, a lack of research on whether mock election…

We compile four hand-collected measures of high-impact Schumpeterian entrepreneurship (venture capital-funded IPOs, self-made billionaire entrepreneurs, unicorn start-ups, and young top global firms f…

Since the seminal paper of Hoffman et al. (1994), an entitlement effect is believed to exist in the Ultimatum Game, in the sense that proposers who have earned their role (as opposed to having it rand…

Wealth is highly correlated between parents and their children; however, little is known about the extent to which these relationships are genetic or determined by environmental factors. We use admini…

Admission to high school in Sweden is based on the final grades from junior high. This article compares students’ final mathematics grade with new data from a high school introductory test score in math…

The purpose of this study is to measure the sensitivity of traded quantities and trade unit values to agricultural production shocks. We develop a general equilibrium model of trade in which productio…

We estimate the importance of inherited wealth in Sweden over the past 200 years. Inheritance is measured both as the annual inheritance flow divided by national income and as the share of inherited w…

We present results from a unique nationwide survey conducted in Sweden on sexual orientation and job satisfaction. Our results show that gay men are more likely to be very satisfied with their job tha…

For some time now, the research focusing on Knowledge Intensive Business Services (KIBS) has been very active. Observing that knowledge as a production factor is only becoming more and more pronounced…

Beginning in the interwar period, industrial foundations became a vehicle for corporate control of large listed firms in Sweden. In the 1990s they were replaced by wealthy individuals who either direct…

Gesell taxes on money have recently received attention as a way of alleviating the zero lower bound on interest rates. Less known is that such taxes generated seigniorage in medieval Europe for around…

We estimate the extent of inheritance tax avoidance among married decedents in Sweden. Following Kopczuk (2007), we compare estates of decedents who pass away from terminal illness and those of decede…

This paper adds to the small literature on the role of welfare benefits and mental health by studying the relationship between uptake of Social Assistance Benefit (SAB) and objective mental health measu…

The relationship between terrorist activities and states of emergency has never been explored in a cross-country perspective. This article is a first step to change that. Given that a terror act has b…

Decision-makers often face incentives to increase risk-taking on behalf of others (e.g., they are offered bonus contracts and contracts based on relative performance). We conduct an experimental study…

We examine the relationship between occupational automation probabilities and employment dynamics over nearly two decades. We show that employment and wage shares of occupations with a higher automati…

Social scientists have created a variety of datasets in recent years that quantify political regimes, but these often provide little data on phases of regime transitions. Our aim is to contribute to f…

We investigate empirically how electoral democracy and judicial independence relate to personal freedom. While judicial independence is positively and robustly related to personal freedom in all its f…

We randomly assigned 115 primary schools in Bangladesh to one of two settings: children studying in groups with friends and children studying in groups with peers. The groups consisted of four people…

I examine the effects of privatization, in the form of acquisitions, in the Swedish electricity distribution sector. As the majority of the distribution networks have remained publicly owned, I use a…

In this study of Swedish lottery players, unearned wealth from random lottery prize winnings was not associated with subsequent healthy lifestyle factors or overall health. The findings suggest that l…

We present a study of the employees of self-employed immigrants with unincorporated firms in Sweden using matched employer-employee data from 2014. Non-European immigrants are more likely than natives…

This paper examines whether social spending cushions the effect of globalization on within‐country inequality. Using information on disposable and market income inequality and data on overall social s…

We estimate the impact of the 2012 removal of the Canadian Wheat Board’s (CWB) single-desk on the spatial pattern of durum wheat acres in Western Canada. We analyze changes in durum seeded acres with…

We study the behavioral drivers of market entry. An experiment allows us to disentangle the impact on entry across different types of markets of two key behavioral mechanisms: overconfidence and attit…

Within the policy debate, there is a fear that large incumbent firms buy small firms’ inventions to ensure that they are not used in the market. We show that such “acquisitions for sleep” can occur if…

To explain the coexistence of economic freedom and big government, this paper distinguishes between big government in the fiscal sense of requiring high taxes, and big government in the Hayekian sense…

We ask whether, as many seem to think, corruption worsens, and judicial accountability improves, inequality, and investigate this empirically using data from 145 countries 1960–2014. We relate perceiv…

We study the willingness to compete against self and others in an experiment with over 650 participants, using a modified version of the Niederle and Vesterlund (2007) design. We show that introducing…

We study whether a woman’s labor supply as a young adult is shaped by the work behavior of her adolescent peers’ mothers. Using detailed information on a sample of U.S. teenagers who are followed over…

Using data from the European Value Survey, covering more than 300,000 respondents in 32 countries between 2002 and 2012, we offer new insight into the consequences for subjective well-being of self-em…

We establish that the labor market helps discipline asset managers via the impact of fund liquidations on their careers. Using hand-collected data on 1,948 professionals, we find that top managers wor…

Economic growth requires factor reallocation across firms and continuous replacement of technologies. Labor market institutions influence economic dynamism by their impact on the supply of a key facto…

Social insurance is often linked to marriage. Existing evidence suggests small marital responses to financial incentives and stems from settings where benefits are realized in the near future. I analy…

We conduct a contest experiment to study if spread seeking and effort can be managed when participants can invest in increasing both the mean and the spread of an uncertain performance variable. Subje…

To understand the relationship between place and politics, we must measure both political attitudes and the ways in which place is represented in the minds of individuals. In this paper, we assess a n…

Although the linear-in-means model is the workhorse model in empirical work on peer effects, its theoretical properties are understudied. In this study, we develop a social-norm model that provides a…

Horizontal shifts in bid curves observed in wholesale electricity markets are consistent with Cournot competition. Quantity competition reduces the informational requirements associated with evaluatin…

The poor performance of credit ratings of structured finance products in the financial crisis has prompted investigation into the role of credit rating agencies (CRAs) in designing and marketing these…

In recent years, the number of listed companies has been declining in many countries across the world. This paper provides a selective survey of the literature on the real economic effects of the stoc…

The global economic landscape has changed dramatically since the turn of the millennium: low and middle income countries have been driving global economic growth, new sources of development finance ha…

Entrepreneurship research suggests that entrepreneurship education and training can bridge the gender gap in entrepreneurship, but little empirical research exists assessing the validity and impact of…

Recent empirical evidence suggests that Chinese development finance may be particularly prone to elite capture and patronage spending. If aid ends up in the pockets of political elites and their ethno…

In sharp contrast to how admitted refugees are being placed in comparable European countries, refugees in Sweden have been disproportionately placed in peripheral and rural areas with high unemploymen…

We provide evidence on the value of patents to startups by leveraging the quasi‐random assignment of applications to examiners with different propensities to grant patents. Using unique data on all fi…

We analyze the determinants of buyout funds’ investment decisions. We argue that when there is imperfect competition for private equity funds, the timing of funds’ investment decisions, their risk‐tak…

Social network analysis can help us understand the root causes of delinquent behaviour and crime and provide practical guidance for the design of crime prevention policies. To illustrate these points,…

Tolerance – respecting individual choice and differences among people – is a prominent feature of modern European culture. That immigrants embrace this kind of liberal value is arguably important for…

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…

We are grateful for the comments to our article, and for the opportunity to respond to them. In our original contribution, we argued that the application of the EOE perspective could help make Austria…

We argue that scholars in the Austrian tradition of economics should incorporate the notion of a collaborative innovation bloc into their study of spontaneous market orders. We demonstrate how success…

For about 70 years, the Canadian Wheat Board (CWB) was one of the world's largest export “single desk” state traders in agriculture, until it was deregulated in 2012 and stripped of its marketing powe…

This paper proposes a theory of gazelle growth in which gazelles can grow either organically or through acquisitions. The model includes three types of firms: incumbent, target, and gazelle. We show t…

Proper government reaction to economic crisis has long been a central element of public policy debate and is experiencing a revival after the Great Recession of 2008. Previous studies argue on theoret…

This article examines gender differences in optimism about the economy. We measure optimism using Swedish survey data in which respondents stated their beliefs about the country’s future economic situa…

Is the Bayh-Dole intellectual property regime associated with more and better academic entrepreneurship than the Professor’s Privilege regime? The authors examine data on US PhDs in the natural scienc…

The authors cast entrepreneurship as one of three career choices—remaining with one’s employer, changing employers, or engaging in entrepreneurship—and theorize how the likelihood of entrepreneurship…

The literature on innovation systems focuses on the supply side (the creation of technology) rather than on how innovations are converted into economic activity and growth via the market (the demand s…

The 2019 Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research has been awarded to Professor Boyan Jovanovic at New York University in the USA. Boyan Jovanovic has developed pioneering research that advances our…

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…

Recent studies document a 30-year decline in various measures of entrepreneurship in the U.S. Using detailed Swedish employer-employee data over the period from 1990 to 2013, we find young firms to be…

A substantial body of literature suggests that politicians are blocked from implementing efficient reforms that solve substantial problems because of special interest groups or budget constraints. Des…

How can a country improve productivity growth in its business sector and reach its growth potential? Sweden during the 1970–2010 period can serve as an example to help other countries understand how t…

Since the early 1980s a wave of liberalizing reforms has swept over the world. Using panel data from 30 European countries in the period 1993–2015, we test the hypothesis that such reforms have led to…

This paper studies the location decisions of the Swedish privately provided independent schools. It makes use of the great expansion of such schools following the 1992 independent school reform, to st…

Purpose: Given the rise of big data and use of analytics, this study explores how the performance measurement systems research field has incorporated dynamic aspects and digitalization prevalent in ra…

Our paper presents an empirical analysis of entrepreneurial well-being using a large-scale longitudinal household survey from the UK that tracks almost 50,000 individuals across seven waves over the p…

We employ finely geo-coded firm-level panel data to assess the long-standing question whether agglomeration economies derive from specialization (within-industry), diversity (between-industry) or over…

We analyze a model of R&D alliance networks where firms are engaged in R&D collaborations that lower their production costs while competing on the product market. We provide a complete charact…

Hjertstrand et al. (2016) recently tested weak separability of the direct utility function using U.S. data on consumption goods, leisure, financial and monetary assets. This paper investigates differen…

Background: Empirical research suggests that household debt and payment difficulties are detrimental to mental health. Despite well-known measurement problems that may contaminate analyses using subje…

We estimate the impact of removing an export subsidy on the local economies of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, exploiting the large regional variation of a 1995 reform. We find that the loss of the…

We construct a cross-country dataset spanning 1900–2014 to estimate the tax elasticity of top incomes. Our results show that top tax elasticities vary tremendously over time; they were medium to low b…

The market-inspired reforms of New Public Management have been particularly pronounced in Swedish local government. Notably, municipally owned enterprises (MOEs) have rapidly grown in numbers. Princip…

The ongoing discussion regarding blockchain technologies is focused primarily on cryptocurrencies, but blockchain features and functionalities have developed beyond financial instruments. As the techno…

This paper uses administrative data to analyze a large employer-borne payroll tax rate cut for young workers in Sweden. We find no effect on net-of-tax wages of young treated workers relative to sligh…

We study to what degree authors who publish in the five most prestigious journals in economics have previously published there and in which world region they are based. Although still high, the concent…

We provide a nonparametric revealed preference approach to demand analysis based on homothetic efficiency. Homotheticity is widely assumed (often implicitly) because it is a convenient and often usefu…

This paper examines whether and, if so, why source country heterogeneity exists in foreign direct investment. Using detailed Swedish matched employer‐employee data for the period from 1996 to 2009, we…