Publications

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…

Sorting of high-ability workers is a main source of urban-rural disparities in economic outcomes. Less is known about when such human capital sorting occurs and who it involves. Using data on 15 cohor…

There is a need for a conceptual approach that, with reference to explicit micro-level mechanisms and processes of industrial dynamics, articulates the role and function of entrepreneurial experimenta…

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…

Social trust has been identified as a catalyst for reforms. We take the literature further in two ways. First, we make a fine-grained analysis of mechanisms through which social trust enables liberali…

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…

The bulk of the literature on the New Public Management (NPM) has been blind to the moral dimension of the market-oriented reforms of the public sector. However, this thesis studies the potential for…

It is imperative that the economies of the European Union become more entrepreneurial to promote innovation and economic growth. To achieve these goals, we propose a reform strategy with respect to (i…

Most developed economies provide significant subsidies to small businesses to encourage innovation. This column argues that while subsidies to reduce entry costs may increase entrepreneurial entry, th…

In 2016, Sweden came out on top of the Reputation Institute's yearly ranking of 55 countries according to how people viewed them as places to live and work. The same year, Sweden outranked 162 other c…

We argue that institutional changes in a liberalizing direction are a sine qua non for economies of the European Union to become more entrepreneurial in order to promote innovation and economic growth…

We conduct a contest experiment where participants can invest in increasing both the mean and the spread of an uncertain performance variable. Subjects are treated with different prize schemes and in…

In this paper, we provide some descriptive statistics of the first twenty years of the WTO (World Trade Organization) dispute settlement. The database used in this paper was assembled by the authors a…

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…

Digitalization is sometimes described as the third industrial revolution. What insights can be gained from comparing the present situation to the state of society at the outset of the first industrial…

Nations that have managed to become rich have had institutional features that supported incentives for value creation while ensuring that the ways insiders and special interest groups can extract mono…

There are two key developments in the current labour market in Sweden. On the one hand, there is a strong economic upturn fuelled primarily by domestic demand. This means that the non-tradable sectors…

All three levels of Swedish government are involved in the health care system. At the national level, the Ministry of Health and Social Affairs is responsible for overall health and health care policy…

The WTO has been lauded for its unique dispute settlement system. Its uniqueness lies primarily in that it is the most comprehensive “compulsory third party” adjudication regime in international relat…

The Swedish experience of introducing quasi-markets in primary care is discussed with respect to the identified objectives of primary care. Empirical studies suggest that objectives related to general…

The reliance on market solutions by the Swedish public sector has increased significantly in recent decades. The Swedish example is characterized by an openness to market solutions in many public-sect…

Today we can observe an increasing spatial divide as some large urban regions and many more medium-sized and small regions face growing problems such as decreasing labour demand, increasing unemployme…

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…

This report contains an analysis of all the relevant studies that measure educational performance in Swedish schools until September 2016. Its main focus is a comparison of Swedish pupils’ attainment…

The authors of this book advise the economies of the European Union to become more entrepreneurial in promoting innovation and economic growth. The authors propose a reform strategy with respect to se…

The Swedish welfare state finds itself in the middle of two major upheavals: The impact of technology and immigration. Having taken in more refugees per capita than most other countries, the pillars o…

This paper addresses women's under-representation in top jobs in organizational hierarchies. We show that promotions to top jobs dramatically increase women's probability of divorce, but do not affect…

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…

Several recent behavioral models of choice build on the idea that decision makers put more weight on attributes in which the available options differ more. We test this assumption in a controlled expe…

We nuance the widely held view that well-functioning institutions are the ultimate prerequisite for innovation and entrepreneurship. This is done by putting the spotlight on the role that formal and i…

In a radical school choice reform in 1992, Sweden’s education system was opened to private competition from independent for-profit and non-profit schools funded by vouchers. Competition was expected 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…

The download is a revised version of my Licentiate Dissertation in Economics from the Department of Economics & Statistics, School of Business, Örebro University.

This paper studies the effect of the firm-size distribution on the relationship between employment and output. We construct a theoretical model, which predicts that changes in demand for industry outp…

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…

Close to 2 700 state-to-state investment agreements (IIAs) worldwide protect foreign direct investment (FDI) against host country policies. We analyze the design and implications of protection against…

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

Sweden is often described as a country where intergenerational social mobility is high, but research also shows that social mobility decreases the closer one gets to the extreme top of the income dist…

This paper presents evidence of how attitudes toward gender roles in the home and market are shaped by Hofstede’s six cultural dimensions. Children of immigrants in a broad set of European countries w…

Recent research at IFN finds that free infant care during the first year of life has not only substantial positive short-term health effects, but also positive long-term effects. These services, inclu…

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…

Delegated contracting describes a widely observable agency mode where a top principal, who has no direct access to a productive downstream agent, hires an intermediary to forward a sub-contract with s…

Previous studies of policy responses to economic crises argue that crises may lead to more interventionist policy but also cause deregulation. The empirical evidence in previous studies is equally mix…

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…

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…

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…

Social trust is linked to many desirable economic and social outcomes. Using new data from a representative sample of 2,668 Swedish expatriates, we examine the robustness of high social trust in count…

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.…

This paper presents new estimates of wealth inequality in Sweden during 2000–2012, linking wealth register data up to 2007 and individually capitalized wealth based on income and property tax register…

The sharing economy (peer-to-peer based sharing or renting activities coordinated through community-based online services) is typically assumed to be closely related to social trust. The two sharing e…

This thesis consists of three chapters, examining strategic behavior in the electricity and water sectors in Sweden. Traditionally, production and distribution in both sectors have been operated by ve…

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…

We estimate the impact of the removal of a railway transportation subsidy on the local economies of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, exploiting the large regional variation in these one-time freigh…

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…

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 upper-secondary voucher schools on average…

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 analyse how the Bosman ruling changed the incentives for football clubs in the European Union (EU) to develop talents. We show that the stiffer bidding competition over star players after the Bosma…

This paper investigates the intergenerational transmission of health in the very long run. Using a unique purpose-built administrative dataset on individuals born in Sweden between 1930–34 and their p…

Ett Letter to the editor av Lars Oxelheim, IFN och Lunds universitet, publiceras i Financial Times. Det handlar om att använda s k helicopter money. Oxelheim förklarar att stater redan lånar från utla…