Publications

Can a democracy attract competent leaders, while attaining broad representation? Economic models suggest that free-riding incentives and lower opportunity costs give the less competent a comparative a…

We analyse the relationship between international sourcing, measured as imports of intermediate inputs, and the technical efficiency of firms in the information and communications technologies (ICT) m…

This paper examines how entrepreneurs and incumbents di¤er in their R&D strategies. We show that entrepreneurs have incentives to choose projects with a higher risk and a higher potential in order…

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…

In multi-unit auctions, it is necessary to specify rationing rules to break ties between multiple marginal bids. The standard approach is to ration marginal bids proportionally. This article shows how…

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…

This paper investigates the potential of an infant intervention to improve life expectancy, contributing to emerging interest in the early life origins of chronic disease. We track individuals from bi…

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…

We experimentally subliminally prime subjects prior to charity donation decisions by showing words that have connotations of pro-social values for a very brief time (17ms). Our main nding is that, com…

Redistributive policies can provide an insurance against future negative economic shocks. This, in turn, implies that an individual's demand for redistribution is expected to increase with her risk av…

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…

In the literature on political economy and public choice, it is typically assumed that government size correlates positively with public corruption. The empirical literature, however, is inconclusive,…

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…

Business sustainability integration is a complex task and strongly linked to operations management. In fact, sustainability based approaches demand operations management boundaries' expansion, creatio…

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…

We propose an axiomatic approach to characterize centrality measures for which the centrality of an agent is recursively related to the centralities of the agents she is connected to. This includes th…

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…

We analyze a network-formation model where agents belong to different communities. Both individual benefits and costs depend on direct as well as indirect connections. Benefits of an indirect connecti…

This paper analyses the short- and longer-term effects of retirement on mental health in ten European countries. It exploits thresholds created by state pension ages in an individual-fixed effects inst…

This article returns to the discussion of how income inequality affects economic growth. The main argument of the article is that economic freedom is likely to mediate the association between inequali…

There is great variation in views on and treatment of minorities such as gay men across the world. We are the first to pinpoint what features of societies are beneficial to gay men’s quality of life b…

Social trust has been identified as a catalyst for reforms. We take the literature further in two ways. First, we analyze mechanisms through which social trust enables liberalizing reforms—by overcomi…

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 use a dynamic model to measure the impact of the entry of large stores on incumbents’ productivity separate from demand while accounting for local markets and the endogeneity of entry. Using data o…

Widespread agreement that a political reform is necessary is no guarantee that it is actually undertaken in a timely manner. There is often a delay before action is taken and reform packages that woul…

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…

Individual willingness to enter competitive environments predicts career choices and labor market outcomes. Meanwhile, many people experience competitive contexts as stressful. We use two laboratory e…

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…

Policy advice by the OECD has long been at the heart of academic debates on welfare state reform, with frequent claims questioning the ideological orientation of recommendations. This paper constructs…

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…

We use a tailor-made survey on a Swedish sample to investigate how individuals’ relative income affects their demand for redistribution. We first document that a majority misperceive their position in…

Wind power generation of electricity has gained popular support because of its low environmental impact and its low costs relative to other renewable energy sources. However, concerns have been raised…

In most OECD-countries immigrants have lower employment and higher unemployment than natives. The gap in labor market outcomes is larger in countries with more immigrant friendly attitudes. This paper…

We report on two experiments investigating whether there is a gender difference in the willingness to compete against oneself (self-competition), similar to what is found when competing against others…

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…

Here, we respond to the comments raised by Nekby and Pettersson-Lidbom on our paper Dahlberg et al. (2012, Journal of Political Economy 120, 41–76). We argue that our estimates are internally valid, b…

Failure to express minority views may distort the behavior of company boards, committees, juries, and other decision-making bodies. Devising a new experimental procedure to measure such conformity in…

This article shows that a simple monetary incentive can dramatically reduce electric energy consumption (EEC) in the residential sector and simultaneously achieve a more desirable allocation of EEC co…

Understanding more about the geographic location of leisure services is an important quest for research. For a long time now in developed economies, almost all employment growth is occurring within th…

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…

This study uses new data on Swedish national wealth over the last two hundred years to examine whether the patterns in wealth-income ratios found by Piketty and Zucman (2014) extend to small and less…

We survey the literature on the economic consequences of the structure of social networks. We develop a taxonomy of "macro" and "micro" characteristics of social-interaction networks and discuss both…

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 investigate whether, how, and why individual education attainment depends on the educational attainment of schoolmates. Specifically, using longitudinal data on students and their friends in a natio…

We propose a dynastic model where individuals are born into an educated or uneducated environment that they inherit from their parents. We study the impact of social interactions on the correlation in…

Since good-looking politicians win more votes, a beauty advantage for politicians on the left or on the right is bound to have political consequences. We show that politicians on the right look more b…

This paper explores the role of retailers as an urban amenity. Using data for Swedish rural and city municipalities for 2002–08, ‘accessibility-to-shops’ measures are constructed for the shops in the…

Over the recent decades there has been a dramatic rise in top income shares in most Western countries. Several explanations have been proposed to explain this phenomenon, some pointing at the role of…

We investigate the eects of organizational culture and personal values on performance under individual and team contest incentives. We develop a model of regard for others and in-group favoritism that…

We develop a model where, in the first stage, minority individuals have to decide whether or not they want to assimilate to the majority culture while, in the second stage, all individuals (both from t…

The purpose of this paper is to explore turnaround performance as a resultant from both Collaborative Decision Making (CDM) processes and collaborative measures. This paper presents how CDM operates i…

Objective: We explore whether standardisation in health care based on evidence on group level and a public health perspective is in conflict with responsiveness towards individual patient’s expectatio…

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…

The purpose of this paper is to nuance the widely held view that well-functioning institutions are the ultimate prerequisite for innovation and entrepreneurship. This is done by putting the spotlight…

The interplay between entrepreneurship and institutions is crucial for economic development; however, the view that institutions determine the extent to which entrepreneurial activity is productive is…

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…

Tolerance is a distinguishing feature of Western culture. Still, it varies between and within countries, as well as over time, and irrespective of whether one values it for its own sake or for its ben…

In this paper, I explore the politically contested association between the degree of capitalism, captured by measures of economic freedom, and the risk and characteristics of economic crises. After of…

This paper attempts to understand foreign direct investment (FDI) heterogeneity and offers useful insights about aggregation issues in FDI estimations by carrying out a spatial econometric analysis us…

Scholars in the fields of archaeology and numismatics have long been familiar with the phenomenon of periodic recoinage (renovatio monetae), which dominated monetary taxation in medieval Europe for al…

We propose a theoretical framework to study the determinants of ethnic and religious identity along two distinct motivational processes: cultural distinction and cultural conformity. Under cultural co…

This article studies the evolution of Swedish inheritance taxation since the late nineteenth century to its abolition in 2004. The contribution of this article is twofold. First, the annual effective…

Workers from a source country consider whether or not to illegally migrate to a host country. This decision depends crucially on the proportion of workers who migrate and on whether or not the host co…

We analyze the intergenerational transmission of the strength of religion focusing on the interplay between family and social influences. We find that parental investment in transmitting religious val…

Drawing on two experiments embedded in online surveys, this article examines the impact of news photos on support for military action. In 2011, respondents were asked about support for ongoing militar…

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…

While it might appear self-evident that the trend toward the New Public Management (NPM) in the public administration systems of many Western countries is an outgrowth of neoliberalism, the case of Sw…

Recent experimental studies suggest that risk aversion is negatively related to cognitive ability. In this paper we report evidence that this relation may be spurious. We recruit a large subject pool…

In this paper, we analyze the evolution of tax-and-transfer progressivity in Sweden over both annual and lifetime horizons. Using a rich micro panel covering the period 1968–2009, we calculate tax rat…

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…

In the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century Iceland was ranked as the least corrupt country in the world by Transparency International and enjoyed top positions in most comparative i…

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…

Health assessments correlate with health outcomes and subjective well-being. Immigrants offer an opportunity to study persistent social influences on health where the social conditions are not endogeno…

Two leading scholars of the 20th century – Hans Kelsen and James Buchanan – both suggested that belief in an objective morality entails a disparaging attitude towards political and individual freedom.…

Purpose – Evasive entrepreneurs innovate by circumventing or disrupting existing formal institutional frameworks. Since such evasions rarely go unnoticed, they usually lead to responses from lawmakers…

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…

This paper investigates the role of strategic complementarities in the context of network games and network formation models. In the general model of static games on networks, we characterize conditio…

Despite significant progress towards the Millennium goals, more than one billion people live on less than 1.25 US dollars per day. Previous research suggests that globalization stimulates poverty redu…

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…

Anecdotal evidence suggests that journalists and bureaucrats in some countries are killed when they try to blow the whistle on corruption. We demonstrate in a simple game-theoretical model how murders…

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…

Macroeconomic fluctuations in interest rates, exchange rates, and inflation can be considered sources of good or bad “luck” for corporate performance if management is unable to adjust operations to th…

We argue that evasive entrepreneurship is an important, although underrated, source of innovation, and provide the first systematic discussion of the concept. We define evasive entrepreneurship as profit…

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…

We use administrative data on Swedish lottery players to estimate the causal impact of substantial wealth shocks on players’ own health and their children’s health and developmental outcomes. Our esti…

We develop a model of entrepreneurial innovation for entry and sale into oligopolies suitable for welfare analysis. We show that the expected consumer welfare can be higher under commercialization by…

I investigate government consumption smoothing (sensitivity) under a balanced budget rule in Swedish municipalities. In general, I find Swedish municipalities to be highly consumption sensitive. Munici…

Performance-based promotion schemes in administrative hierarchies have limitations. Chinese provincial leaders, despite facing strong career concerns, make different policy decisions depending on thei…

In our 2011 survey of the literature in the Journal of Economic Surveys on the effect of government size on economic growth in wealthy countries we find a relatively consistent pattern: An increase in…

To understand how electoral reform affects political outcomes, one needs to assess its total effect, incorporating how the reform affects the outcomes given the political status quo (the mechanical ef…

Destination countries can adopt selective immigration policies to improve migrants' quality. Screening potential migrants on the basis of observable characteristics also influences their self-selection…

We conducted a natural field experiment to evaluate two resource conservation programs. One intervention consisted of a moral appeal message asking university employees to cut back on printing in gener…