Publications

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 analyse a pioneering prog…

This is an English version of the article  ”Työmarkkinat Suomessa ja Ruotsissa – ruotsalainen näkökulma”, published in Talous & Yhteiskunta, no 2, 10–17, 2016, issued by the Labour Institute for E…

A large and growing empirical literature has presented evidence of job polarization, i.e. the simultaneous growth of high-wage jobs and low-wage jobs at the expense of middle-wage jobs. Thus far, the…

This study examines the role of institutional environment in influencing the migration of corporate governance best practice into 22 emerging African economies.  Using a unique and comprehensive sampl…

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…

We use new population-wide register data on inheritances and wealth in Sweden to estimate the causal impact of inheritances on wealth inequality. We find that inheritances reduce relative wealth inequ…

Even though the World Trade Organization (WTO) ensures equal access to the dispute settlement system, the legal process is still highly costly, an aspect that primarily affects poorer developing count…

High levels of social trust has been linked to both public sector size and long term economic growth, thereby helping to explain how some countries are able to combine high taxes and relatively high l…

Although institutional reforms are necessary to increase rates of entrepreneurship in European countries, we argue that one-size-fits-all reform strategies are unlikely to be successful. Reform strate…

I study the link between taxes and youth self-employment. I make use of a Swedish reform, implemented in 2007–09, which suddenly made the payroll tax and the self-employment tax vary by age. The resul…

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…

Over the past two decades, the U.S. stock market has halved in size as the “public firm model” has begun to fall out of favor. We develop a political economy model of delistings from the stock market…

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 ins…

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…

We estimate the impact that removing a railway transportation subsidy has on the adoption of production technology for Western Canadian farms by using a unique combination of census and freight rate d…

This paper presents an empirical test of the anticompetitive effects of joint ownership by examining the operation of three nuclear plants in Sweden. Since maintenance is the main conduit explaining v…

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 endogen…

We use rich data on all business, economics, and engineering graduates in Sweden to study the lack of women among CEOs. A comprehensive battery of graduates’ characteristics explains 40% of the gender…

This paper shows that in online car auctions, resellers are better at appraising the value of the cars they are bidding on than are consumers. Using a unique data set of online car auctions, I show th…

Welfare services are an important part of the Nordic welfare states both financially and for welfare state redistribution. Baumol’s cost disease, Wagner’s law, and population ageing are often said to…

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…

The purpose of this study is to measure the sensitivity of trade volumes and unit values to agricultural productivity shocks at home and abroad. We find that the unit values of trade flows vary systemat…

Stimulating entrepreneurship is high on policymakers’ agendas. But what should we mean when we talk about entrepreneurship, and why is it so important? Should policymakers try to influence entrepreneu…

It is frequently argued that policymakers should target high-tech firms, i.e., firms with high R&D intensity, because such firms are considered more innovative and therefore potential fast-growers. T…

This paper studies the impact of market-specific news on the short-term forward premia on the Nordic electricity market. I show that the short-term premia between the day-ahead and intra-day electricit…

Though more than 100 countries have adopted gender quotas, the effects of these reforms on women's political leadership are largely unknown. We exploit a natural experiment—a 50–50 quota imposed by th…

This study estimates the impact of financial deregulation on top income shares. Using the novel econometric method of constructing synthetic control groups, we show that the "Big Bang"-deregulations i…

The VC sector is interesting both in its own right and as a proxy for entrepreneurial finance in a broader sense. We highlight the tax treatment of stock options as an important factor for variations…

We construct a multi-country employer-employee data to examine the consequences of employment protection. We identify the effects by comparing worker exit rates between units of the same firm that ope…

As computer science and complex network theory develop, non-cooperative games and their formation and application on complex networks have been important research topics. In the inter-firm innovation…

Evasive entrepreneurs innovate by circumventing or disrupting existing formal institutional frameworks. These evasions rarely go unnoticed and usually lead to responses from lawmakers and regulators.…

This study presents a new database, the Swedish National Wealth Database, which contains annual data on private, public, and national wealth and sectoral saving rates in Sweden over the past two centu…

The question how should the qualifications of students be assessed is one of the most defining and important aspects of any education system.

What is the impact of labour market institutions on entrepreneurial activity? Recently it has been argued that flexible labour market institutions have a positive influence on entrepreneurial activity…

William Easterly is not only widely known as one of the world’s most eminent development economists, but also as a forceful opponent of the way in which the West tries to promote growth in developing…

Innovation is increasingly considered the key to elevating prosperity and securing sustainable long-term growth. The last few decades have also witnessed a refi nement of previous growth models to inc…

In this chapter, we provide an overview of the literature on key players in networks. We first introduce the theoretical concept of the key player who is the agent that should be targeted by the plann…

Since at least the 1960s, the European Union (EU) has offered various kinds of non-reciprocal trade preferences for developing countries. Originally, these trade preferences had at least two policy go…

We study risk taking on behalf of others, both when choices involve losses and when they do not. A large-scale incentivized experiment with subjects randomly drawn from the Danish population is conduc…

Welfare services are an important part of the Nordic welfare states both financially and for welfare state redistribution. Baumol’s cost disease, Wagner’s law, and population ageing are often said to…

This paper analyzes the extensive-margin labor-supply effects of a Swedish earned income tax credit introduced in 2007. The reform was one of the government’s flagship reforms to boost employment, but…

In this analysis of how electoral rules and outcomes shape the internal organization of political parties, we make an analogy to primary elections to argue that parties use preference-vote tallies to…

This paper analyzes the role of competition between political parties for the promotion and turnover of social minorities in party organizations. We collect extensive and reliable panel data for the c…

There is a scarcity of women at the apex of political power, as well as a lack of methods to disentangle the potential sources of this under-representation. This article suggests a four-step method to…

We show that officer training during the Swedish military service has a strong positive effect on the probability of attaining a managerial position later in life. The most intense type of officer tra…

In some classes of models, taxes at the owner level are "neutral" and have no effect on firm activity. However, this tax neutrality is sensitive to assumptions and no longer holds in more complex mode…

Health care as any other public service is subject to many potentially conflicting objectives and many actors. Over time, the traditional goal of health care systems of distributive justice has been a…

This article provides a comprehensive critique of current corporate foreign exchange risk management (FXRM) practices. The authors characterize much of FXRM as a “legacy” activity, a set of outdated,…

Uncertainty triggered by government policy may have played a large role in the U.S. economy’s slow recovery from the Great Recession. Whether or not it is the leading cause of the sluggishness, regime…

In many countries, sickness absence financed by generous insurance benefits is an important concern in the policy debate. There are strong variations in absence behavior among local geographical areas…

A distinctive feature of the Nordic model is that economic resources are redistributed between citizens to a high degree. Historically, the Nordic voters have expressed a higher demand for such redist…

We investigate identity issues to explain differences in school performance between students of different races. Using a unique dataset of friendship relationships between students in the US, we show…

What is entrepreneurship and why is it crucial for our society?How does entrepreneurship affect economic development and how can it be encouraged? This book explores these questions,discussing how ent…

As the share of students attending independent schools across Canada increases, the regulatory context of these non-government schools becomes increasingly relevant. Innovation, performance, and effic…

According to virtually all international corruption rankings, Sweden is one of the top performing countries with very few exposed incidents of corruption. But does this automatically imply that it can…

There is a clear trend in rich countries that despite rising incomes and living standards, the gap between rich and poor is widening. What does this mean for our health? Does increasing income inequal…

This paper investigates recent claims that ‘neoliberal’ policies and reforms are associated with higher homicide rates and other types of crime. Using a panel of the 50 US states observed between 1981…

För att säkerställa att Sverige får ut det bästa av framtida digitaliseringsmöjligheter, måste landets lagstiftning omprövas, skriver Mårten Blix, gästforskare på IFN, i ett inlägg i The Local.

We use a dynamic oligopoly model of entry and exit with store-type differentiation to evaluate how entry regulations affect profitability, market structure and welfare. Based on unique data for all re…

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 that are beneficial to gay men’s quality of l…

The paper provides a framework for analysis of remuneration to agents whose task is to make well-informed decisions on behalf of a principal, with managers in large corporations as the most prominent…

We analyze how market design in.uences the bidding behavior in multi-unit procurement auctions where suppliers have uncertain costs and are uncertain about the availability of production units, as in…

Electricity markets are becoming more integrated around the world. However, the knowledge of the effects of different auction formats on suppliers’ strategies in the presence of transmission constrain…

As computer science and complex network theory develop, non-cooperative games and their formation and application on complex networks have been important research topics. In the inter-firm innovation…

Prior literature shows that choices regarding board composition are associated with earnings management. We add to this literature by examining the effects of the presence of a foreign board member on…

We consider a network game with strategic complementarities where the individual reward or the strength of interactions is only partially known by the agents. Players receive different correlated sign…

This thesis consists of four papers summarized as follows. Do Payroll Tax Cuts Raise Youth Employment? We study whether payroll tax reductions are an effective means to raise youth employment. In 2007…

We consider a procurement auction, where each supplier has private costs and submits a stepped supply function. We solve for a Bayesian Nash equilibrium and show that the equilibrium has a price insta…

Online Appendix We study the effect of wealth on labor supply using the randomized assignment of monetary prizes in a large sample of Swedish lottery players. We find winning a lottery prize modestly…

This paper examines how consumers react to the financial distress of durable goods manufacturers by looking at the Swedish new car market. We employ a difference-in-differences matching methodology wh…

How can a country improve the 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 h…

Do pork barrel politics really change voting behavior? IFN researchers measured the effect of high-profile pledges on child care in Swedish elections – with surprising results, writes Henrik Jordahl.

This paper studies the population dynamics of preference traits in a model of intergenerational cultural transmission with cultural leaders who compete for oblique socialization. We show that by addin…

In this study I find that employment in family firms is less sensitive to performance and product market fluctuations. I show this by investigating aggregate fluctuations at the industry level as well…

This article presents results from a laboratory experiment studying the channels through which different law enforcement strategies deter cartel formation. With leniency policies offering immunity to…

This paper analyzes the relationship between crime and agglomeration where the land, labor, product, and crime markets are endogenously determined. Our main theoretical findings are the following: (i)…

We conduct laboratory experiments where third-party spectators have the opportunity to redistribute resources between two agents, thereby eliminating inequality and offsetting the consequences of cont…

Multinational firms not only make acquisitions, but also frequently divest affiliates. Affiliate divestiture is the result of many factors, some internal and some external to the firm. Using detailed confi…

We estimate the causal effect of wealth on stock market participation using administrative data on Swedish lottery players. A $150,000 windfall gain increases stock ownership probability among pre-lot…

Daniel Rubenson, Ryerson University och affilierad till IFN, skriver tillsammans med två kollegor ett inlägg om det kandensiska valet  i Washington Posts blogg The Monkey Cage. "Många i media misstolk…

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…

Building on a framework introduced by Chaney and Ossa (2013), we construct a task-based model of the firm’s choice of occupational inputs to examine how that choice varies with greater global engageme…

We explore the potential effects of the first leaders of Sub-Saharan Africa. We first outline a set of theoretical reasons for why leaders may matter particularly at the critical juncture of African i…

This study presents a new database, the Swedish National Wealth Database (SNWD), which contains annual data on private, public and national wealth and sectoral saving rates in Sweden over the past two…

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…

In some classes of models, taxes at the owner level are “neutral” and have no effect on firm activity. However, this tax neutrality is sensitive to assumptions and no longer holds in more complex mode…

The afternoon effect, i.e., that prices in a sequence of auctions with identical items are decreasing with the order in which the auctions are terminated, is a frequently observed phenomenon in empiri…

I analyze renewable electricity policy in a multinational electricity market with transmission investment. If national policy makers choose support schemes to maximize domestic welfare, a trade policy…

The study develops a simple model where workers can obtain a job through either their strong or weak ties. It shows that increasing the time spent with weak ties raises the employment rate of workers.…

Previous research has found that weak institutions can hamper investment and alter patterns of trade. However, little is known about the impact of institutional quality on offshoring. This lack of kno…

Simulation studies have pointed to the advantages of trading closer to real-time with large amounts of wind power. Using Danish data, I show that, as expected, shortfalls increase the probability of t…

We study labor-market discrimination of individuals with “specific” characteristics in Italy. We conduct a field experiment in two Italian cities: Rome and Milan, by sending “fake” CVs to real ads. We…