Publications

Preferences are fundamental building blocks in all models of economic and political behavior. We study a new sample of comprehensively genotyped subjects with data on economic and political preference…

Recent theoretical analysis suggests that a reduction in the cost of exporting increases the degree of assortative matching between workers and firms in export-oriented industries. Changes that reduce…

The presence of urban villages is a unique product of China's urbanization. In this article, we explore the effects of urban villages on the formal housing market. For this purpose, we develop a hedon…

We construct a model where an entrepreneur can innovate for entry or for sale. It is shown that increased product market competition tends to increase the relative profitability of innovation for sale.…

This article studies whether conformism behavior affects individual outcomes in crime. We present a social network model of peer effects with ex ante heterogeneous agents and show how conformism and d…

In this article, it is pointed out that the European Union does not have a harmonized practice when it comes to trade procedures, implying that countries in the rest of the world face different trade…

Manuscript Type: Perspective Research Question/Issue: In the finance literature theoretical arguments have largely predicted a world-wide convergence towards the Anglo-American model of corporate contr…

David Brady argues that low European poverty rates are a result of the welfare state. His finding relies on a relative measure of poverty, according to which the threshold for being poor differs acros…

One of the major reasons why inventors are awarded patents by governments is they encourage R&D investments and commercialization of inventions. If the patent holder commercializes his/her inventi…

This paper extends the nonparametric structural method to estimate labor supply developed by Blomquist and Newey (2002) to handle cases in which there are individuals who do not work. The method is th…

Using spatial data analysis techniques, we compare the spatial distribution of crime and the black population density across the London boroughs. We show that the higher is the density of the black po…

It is well known that communication often serves as a facilitator for cooperation in static games. Yet, communication can serve entirely different purposes in dynamic settings as communication during…

We showed, in Berggren and Elinder (2012), that tolerance toward homosexuals is negatively and quite robustly related to economic growth. In a comment, Bornhoff and Lee (this issue) question this findi…

We investigate how tolerance, as measured by attitudes toward different types of neighbors, affects economic growth in a sample of 54 countries. Unlike previous studies, by Richard Florida and others,…

Self-employment is the most frequently used measure of entrepreneurship. However, its definition varies between countries, which makes comparisons difficult. We present an analysis of Swedish self-emp…

A number of recent papers have examined the environmental and genetic sources of individual differences in economic and financial decision making. Here we contribute to this burgeoning literature by e…

This paper investigates the causal link between the ethnic diversity in a society and its inhabitants’ preferences for redistribution.We exploit exogenous variation in immigrant shares stemming from a…

This study examines the determinants of citation success among authors who have recently published their work in economic history journals. Besides offering clues about how to improve one's scientific…

This paper studies the relationship between height and leadership. Using data from a representative sample of Swedish men, I document that tall men are significantly more likely to attain managerial po…

Although macroeconomic factors are part of several models for evaluation of credit risk, there is little effort to distinguish between effects of such factors and “intrinsic” factors on changes in cre…

The objective of the paper is to explore and give an overview of two central policy alternatives to improve the integration between the European Union and developing countries by removing barriers to…

We look at the effect of importance of religion in daily life on social trust, defined as the share of a population that thinks that people in general can be trusted. We make use of new data from the…

The literature on the relationship between the size of government and economic growth is full of seemingly contradictory findings. This conflict is largely explained by variations in definitions and t…

We develop a dynamic model of identity formation that explains why ethnic minorities may choose to adopt oppositional identities (i.e. some individuals may reject or not the dominant culture) and why…

In the early 1990s the Swedish economy experienced a severe economic and financial crisis which resulted in a substantial GDP decrease. Even though the crisis was not a complete surprise for many econ…

Billions are allocated annually to university research. The increased specialization and international integration of research and researchers has animated the need for comparisons of performance acro…

We analyze the intergenerational transmission of education focusing on the interplay between family and neighborhood effects. We develop a theoretical model suggesting that both neighborhood quality a…

The objective of this paper is to perform an empirical description and analysis of the duration of EU imports from the rest of the world. Toward this aim, we employ a rich data set of detailed imports…

We develop a search-matching model with rural–urban migration and an explicit land market. Wages, job creation, urban housing prices are endogenous and we characterize the steady-state equilibrium. We…

We are thankful to Michael Lundholm and Mahmood Arai for pointing us towards a coding error which invalidates the regressions in our paper. Correcting the code leads to a decrease in sample sizes, tho…

Endogenous growth theory suggests that technological knowledge stimulates growth, yet the micro-foundations of this process remain obscure. Knowledge spillover theory posits that growth is contingent…

A review of the literature on firm taxation reveals that the economics of entrepreneurship has not sufficiently been taken into consideration. We discuss how this affects conclusions derived from stan…

This paper carries out a critical reappraisal of the two contending theories purporting to explain long-run government spending: Wagner's Law and different variants of the ratchet effect. We analyze d…

Does control of patronage jobs significantly increase a political party's chances of winning elections in U.S. states? We employ a differences-in-differences design, exploiting the considerable variat…

We use newly compiled top income data and structural breaks techniques to estimate common trends and breaks in inequality across countries over the twentieth century. Our results both confirm earlier fi…

The WTO leaves discretion over environmental policies to its members, but requests that a fundamental non-discrimination principle is respected: National Treatment (NT). The provision seeks to prevent…

The aim of this paper is to provide a tractable model where both socialization (or network formation) and productive efforts can be analyzed simultaneously. This permits a fullfledged equilibrium/welfa…

Financial market incompleteness and (partial) segmentation of financial markets internationally may endow some firms with a financial advantage which can be exploited through foreign direct investment…

We examine the impact of cross-border acquisitions on intra-firm wage dispersion using a detailed Swedish linked employer-employee data set including data on all firms and about 50% of the Swedish lab…

We develop an urban-search model in which firms post wages. When all workers are identical, there is a unique wage in equilibrium even in the presence of search and spatial frictions. This wage is aff…

The financial crisis starting in 2008 made many European countries opt for a change of exchange rate regime. The choice of price measure as an entry requirement to the European Economic and Monetary Un…

Foreign direct investment (FDI) has been important in the growth and global integration of developing economies. Both Northeast and Southeast Asia, especially the latter, have been part of this develo…

A robust positive correlation between height and intelligence, as measured by IQ tests, has been established in the literature. This paper makes several contributions toward establishing the causes of…

This paper investigates labor productivity growth and the contribution to labor productivity growth in Swedish manufacturing during the diffusion of electric motors and ICT. The paper distinguishes be…

Previous research, notably Baumol (1990), has highlighted the role of institutions in channeling entrepreneurial supply into productive, unproductive, or destructive activities. However, entrepreneurs…

In this paper, I investigate whether instead of strengthening home-based production, government R&D-subsidies can induce R&D-intensive firms to locate production abroad. Investigating firm-level…

We develop a regional model where, in the city, unemployment prevails because of too high (efficiency) wages, while, in the rural area, workers are paid at their marginal productivity. We characterize…

The make-or-buy decision is analyzed in a simple framework combining contractual incompleteness with the existence of an imperfect but contractible performance measure. Contractual incompleteness give…

Using data from the UK Quarterly Labor Force Survey, this paper examines the job finding methods of different ethnic groups in the UK. Our empirical findings suggest that, though personal networks are a…

(i) François Lévêque and Howard Shelanski, (eds.), Antitrust and Regulation in the EU and US: Legal and Economic Perspectives (Cheltenham, UK, and Northamprton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2009), reviewed by La…

We study the relationship between ethnic identity and labour market outcomes of non-EU immigrants in Europe. Using the European Social Survey, we find that there is a penalty to be paid for immigrants…

This paper analyses a wholesale electricity market with supply function competition. Trade in the forward and spot markets is represented by a two-stage game, and its subgame perfect Nash equilibrium…

The World Trade Organization (WTO) is the busiest state to state court nowadays. It is a rarity in international relations since it includes compulsory third-party adjudication and a permanent second…

A recurring theme in evaluations of Swedish residential youth care is that treatment is often unplanned. Using a data set of teenagers placed in youth care in 1991 (N = 357), we show that planned trea…

We use data from the Swedish military enlistment to assess the importance of cognitive and noncognitive ability for labor market outcomes. The measure of noncognitive ability is based on a personal in…

This paper attempts to measure the size of South–South foreign direct investment (FDI) in developing East Asia and the trends in it, the characteristics of the investing countries, and the investments…

Do voters tend to underestimate the costs of government spending? Several features of its tax system make Sweden unusually well suited for testing the proposition that voters systematically misperceiv…

This article surveys the literature and adds to the evidence on the impact of employment protection legislation on employment. While stringent employment protection contributes to less turnover and jo…

The Industrial Institute for Economic and Social Research (Industriens Utredningsinstitut, IUI) was founded in 1939. In less than ten years, IUI grew from a small survey bureau to a leading research i…

The supply function equilibrium provides a game-theoretic model of strategic bidding in oligopolistic wholesale electricity auctions. This paper presents an intuitive account of current understanding…

Individuals differ in how they construct their investment portfolios, yet empirical models of portfolio risk typically account only for a small portion of the cross-sectional variance. This paper asks…

Science & Technology (S&T) is high on the Chinese policy agenda and the country aims at becoming an innovation-driven economy. Small firms have been important in technology development in othe…

Public policy affects the prevalence and performance of both productive and high-impact entrepreneurship. High-impact entrepreneurship prospers when knowledge is successfully generated and exploited i…

It is often claimed that small and young firms account for a disproportionately large share of net employment growth. We conduct a meta-analysis of the empirical evidence regarding whether net employme…

In this article, we study the relationship between political polarization and public spending using the dispersion of self-reported political preferences as our measure of polarization. Political pola…

This paper reconsiders the predominant typology pioneered by Baumol (J Polit Econ 98(5):893–921, 1990) among productive, unproductive and destructive entrepreneurship. It is shown that the foundation…

China needs a substantial growth of modern-sector employment to absorb its huge supply of underemployed people and new labor market entrants. The present crisis with its massive layoffs of workers mak…

The increase in foreign direct investments raises concerns about labor market consequences in many countries. It is feared that multinational firms are inclined to shift jobs abroad and increase job vo…

This paper presents a detailed analysis of voters' responses to municipality and regional-level unemployment and economic growth, using panel data on 284 municipalities and 9 regions, covering Swedish…

According to Schumpeter, the creative process of economic development can be divided into the stages of invention, innovation (commercialization) and imitation. Each stage is associated with specific s…

We study the impact of job proximity on individual employment and earnings. The analysis exploits a Swedish refugee dispersal policy to obtain exogenous variation in individual locations. Using very d…

We show how initial wealth differences between low-skilled minorities and white workers can generate differences in their labor-market outcomes. This even occurs in the absence of a taste for discrimi…

Rapid price decreases for ICT products in the 1990s have been largely attributed to the introduction of hedonic price indexes.Would hedonic price indexing also have had large effects on measured price…

This study shows empirically that the political costs of sovereign default can differ considerably for domestic and external debt. The analysis uses new evidence from Danish and Swedish bond markets a…

This paper uses the Swedish municipal amalgamation reform of 1952 to study the common pool problem in politics. The amalgams were common pools and the municipalities had incentives to free-ride on the…

We propose a model of trade agreements in which contracting is costly, and as a consequence the optimal agreement may be incomplete. In spite of its simplicity, the model yields rich predictions on th…

Delinquents are embedded in a network of relationships. Each delinquent decides in a noncooperative way how much delinquency effort he will exert. We characterize the Nash equilibrium and derive an op…

The process of globalization encompasses economic and financial integration. The abolition of capital controls and the dismantling of barriers of different kinds will expose previously sheltered compan…

In contrast to previous efforts to model an individual’s movement from wage work into entrepreneurship, we consider that individuals might transition incrementally by retaining their wage job while en…

We study the role of beauty in politics using candidate photos that figured prominently in electoral campaigns. Our investigation is based on visual assessments of 1929 Finnish political candidates fro…

Where a community or group is socially excluded from a dominant group, some individuals of that group may identify with the dominant culture and others may reject that culture. The aim of this article…

North Korea is perceived by many as one of the most totalitarian societies of modern time. But in the wake of the economic collapse of the 1990s, North Korean totalitarianism has grappled with new con…

We develop a duocentric-city model and show that the ratio between the property tax in the suburbs and in the center has an ambiguous impact on the size of the city. We test this model by using a data…

We extend the literature on exclusive dealing by allowing the incumbent and the potential entrant to merge. This uncovers new effects. First, exclusive dealing can be used to improve the incumbent’s b…

Media firms sometimes allow consumers to pay to remove advertisements from an adbased product. We formally examine an ad-based monopolist’s incentives to introduce this option. When deciding whether or…

We develop a theoretical oligopoly model to study how international differences in profit and capital gains taxes affect foreign acquisitions. Reductions in foreign profit taxes tend to trigger ineffi…

Producers submit offer curves to a procurement auction, e.g. an electricity auction, before uncertain demand has been realised. In the supply function equilibrium (SFE), every firm commits to the offe…

Since July 2007, the world economy has experienced a severe financial crisis that originated in the U.S. housing market. Subsequently, the crisis has spread to financial sectors in European and Asian…

We develop a search-matching model in which mobility costs are so high that it is too costly for workers to relocate when a change in their employment status occurs. We show that, in equilibrium, wage…

Displacement is expected to decrease the reservation wage of self-employment by decreasing earnings in paid employment and increasing the probability of unemployment. This paper examines whether displ…

In a recent paper, García-Mainar and Montuenga-Gómez [García-Mainar, I. & Montuenga-Gómez, V. M. (2005). Education returns of wage earners and self-employed workers: Portugal vs. Spain. Economics…

The issue considered in this study is whether there is misreporting in official data on disability status. While there is a rather large literature on misreporting of self-assessed disability, evidence…

We develop a model that shows that, at the Nash equilibrium, the outcome of each individual embedded in a network is proportional to his/her Katz–Bonacich centrality measure. This measure takes into a…