Publications

We show that the firm-size distribution is an important determinant of the relationship between an industry’s employment and output. A theoretical model predicts that changes in demand for an industry…

This study provides an empirical test of price mimicking among publicly owned water utilities. Using a fixed effects spatial Durbin model with data from Swedish municipalities during 2002–2012, I estim…

We show that house prices in general did not respond to a substantial cut in the national property tax in Sweden. The estimates are based on rich register data covering more than 100,000 sales over a…

We study the effect of wealth on labor supply using the randomized assignment of monetary prizes in a large sample of Swedish lottery players. Winning a lottery prize modestly reduces earnings, with t…

The hospitality industry is a rapidly growing revenue generator in many countries and is becoming economically important for generating employment and for integrating of immigrants into the labor mark…

The 2017 Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research is given to Hernando de Soto, president of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy (ILD) in Lima, Peru. Over the last 30 years, Hernando de Soto has…

This thesis covers issues related to financing in mergers and acquisitions. It studies the relationship between firms’ financing conditions and firms’ decisions to either buy or sell assets.

We construct a model of strategic behavior in sequential markets which exhibits a persistent forward price premium. On the spot market, producers wield market power while purchasers are price takers. …

This paper studies social-tie formation when individuals care about the geographical location of other individuals. In our model, the intensity of social interactions can be chosen at the same time as…

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

We argue that the corporate governance of emerging economy IPO firms is influenced by firm-specific institutionally embedded block ownership groups. Applying an extended institutional logic perspectiv…

This paper examines employment and productivity dynamics in the Swedish business sector during the period 1996–2013. In order to analyze employment and productivity in a consistent way we apply a nove…

Instructional time is seen as an important determinant of school performance, but little is known about the effects of student absence. Combining historical records and administrative data for Swedish…

We propose a method to recover homothetic preferences from choice data with minor optimization or measurement errors. Our method allows for a more detailed graphical analysis to reveal subjects' prefe…

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore how the strength of political veto players affects the long-run credibility of economic institutions and how they jointly affect entrepreneurial activ…

How important are political rules for economic growth? Recent work at the Research Institute of Industrial Economics supports theories that changes in political institutions can be key determinants of…

Global engagement can impact firm organization and the occupations firms need. We use a simple task-based model of the firm’s choice of occupational inputs to examine how that choice varies with globa…

Using a dataset with over 24 million year-employment observations and the universe of more than 230,000 entries into entrepreneurship in one economy we analyze the gross (including the founders), net…

This paper provides an empirical assessment of an annual wealth tax. Using Swedish administrative data, I estimate net-of-tax-rate elasticities of taxable wealth in the range [0.09, 0.27]. Cross-check…

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…

When and how do entrepreneurs sell their inventions? To address this issue, we develop an endogenous entry-sale asymmetric information oligopoly model. We show that lowquality inventions are sold dire…

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…

For about seventy 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…

We show that a common regulatory mandate in electricity markets that use location-based pricing that requires all customers to purchase their wholesale electricity at the same quantity-weighted averag…

The association between occupational status and health has been taken to reveal the presence of health inequalities shaped by occupational status. However, that interpretation assumes no influence of…

We build a public finance model that explains why voters vote for right-wing populists, and also under which conditions established politicians will adopt a right-wing populist policy platform. Voters…

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 decompose the impact of trade reform on technology adoption and land use to study how aggregate changes were driven by reallocation versus within-farm adaptation. Using detailed census data coverin…

We report the results of a randomized controlled trial testing whether incentivizing physical exercise improves the academic performance of college students. As expected, the intervention increases ph…

Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) has increased in importance over the last decades, globally as well as in Indonesia. We examine how such inflows of FDI affects value added in Indonesia. The effect is…

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,…

In this dissertation, I present a unique pattern of lawmaking during crisis: laws become enacted quicker while at the same time gaining length. The data this pattern is based on come from the study of…

This paper studies the effect of the 1918–19 influenza pandemic on fertility using a historical dataset from Sweden. Our results suggest an immediate reduction in fertility driven by morbidity, and ad…

This paper develops a stylized model of cross-border balancing. We distinguish three degrees of cooperation: autarky, reserves exchange and reserves sharing. The model shows that TSO cooperation reduc…

We estimate impacts of exposure to an infant health intervention trialled in Sweden in the early 1930s using purposively digitised birth registers linked to school catalogues, census fies and tax reco…

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…

We find an inverted relation between a player's birthday and the likelihood of receiving the Ballon d'Or (awarded to the best football player in the world). We develop a multi-period skill formation m…

The Swedish employer paid payroll tax was reduced substantially for young workers in 2007, causing firms’ average social fees to depend on the age structure of their employees. Using pre-reform condit…

Using the World Management Survey method, we map and analyse management quality in Swedish primary care centres. On average, private providers have higher management quality than public ones. We also…

Religious beliefs and practices influence individual lives and societies in many ways. We study how religion affects self-assessed health, which in turn is important for both individual well-being and…

In this paper, we analyze how a suffrage reform in 1862/63 that shifted the de jure distribution of political power from landowners to industrialists affected Sweden’s industrialization and economic a…

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…

State-to-state investment treaties such as TTIP and CETA have recently come under intense fire in the policy debate. Their vague formulations and highly potent compensation mechanisms are alleged to p…

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…

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…

Cross-country comparisons of entrepreneurship are difficult due to the lack of standard empirical definitions of entrepreneurship. Measures focusing on small business activity and self-employment sugg…

We propose a management career model where females face a gender-specific career hurdle. We show that female managers will, on average, be more skilled than male managers, since females from the low e…

Europe continues to lag behind the U.S. in venture capital (VC) activity and in the creation of successful startups, and has recently been surpassed by China. This is despite the fact that many Europe…

As cities increasingly become centers of economic growth and innovation, there is a need to understand their inner workings and organization in greater detail. We use ge-coded firm-level panel data at…

We estimate trends in global earnings dispersion across occupational groups using a new database covering 66 developed and developing countries between 1970 and 2015. Our main finding is that global e…

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 responsiveness of high-income earners to taxation is a central aspect of tax system design. This column presents patterns in the tax elasticity of top earners for up to 30 countries over a period…

Ancient Athenians drew lots to determine who served in public office, but oligarchs at that time (and ever since) have argued that there is a trade-off between competence and fair representation. This…

Board room quotas have recently received an increasing amount of attention. This paper provides novel evidence on firm performance from an exogenous change in female board participation in Sweden. We…

The link between tax progressivity and the income distribution is the subject of intense debate. This column presents new evidence from tax reforms during the 1980s and 1990s to examine how reduced pr…

An increasing reliance on solar and wind power has raised concern about system ability to consistently satisfy electricity demand. This paper examines countries unilateral incentives to achieve supply…

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…

By the late 1960s, real effective taxation of income from individual firm owner­ship in Sweden approached 100 percent. A series of tax reforms initiated in the late 1970s reversed this situation. This…

Timothy Snyder has suggested an interpretive framework of the Holocaust that runs counter to previous scholarly literature as well as to popular perception. Snyder’s central thesis is that the mass mu…

According to Swedish penal code, there is a “rebate” on all prison sentences before the 21st birthday. We exploit this age discontinuity to investigate how individuals respond to harsher punishments.…

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…

We study the link between tax progressivity and top income shares. Using variation from large-scale Western tax reforms in the 1980s and 1990s and the novel synthetic control method, we find large and…

We compile data spanning the period 1900–2014 and up to 30 countries to study long-run patterns in the tax elasticity of top incomes. Our results show that top tax elasticities vary tremendously over…

Christmas is when people are expected to act selflessly for the well-being of others, but are people actually more altruistic at this time of the year? Responding to this question poses a challenge be…

A successful transformation to a carbon neutral energy system requires the correct investments in transmission and production capacity. In a zonal pricing electricity market, the one proposed by the E…

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…

The paper studies how stock price misvaluation and financial frictions affect whether an acquisition occurs between or within industries and whether the acquirer pays in cash or stocks. I set up a mod…

While previous research examines how institutions matter for general life satisfaction and how specific institutions embodying equal rights for gay people matter for the life satisfaction of gays, we…

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…