Publications

We experimentally prime subjects subliminally prior to charity donation decisions by showing words that have connotations to prosocial values for a very short duration of time (17ms). Our main finding…

Gesell taxes on money holdings have received attention in recent decades as a way of alleviating the zero lower bound on interest rates. Less known is that such a tax was the predominant method used t…

This study examines the governance attributes of post-IPO (initial public offering) retained ownership of private equity in business group constituent firms in contrast to their unaffiliated counterpa…

This paper examines the Swedish industrial reorganization process that took place from 1990-2009. We argue that the early adoption of information and communication technology (ICT) in Swedish industry…

We review and assess the role local institutional framework conditions play in fostering local entrepreneurship. The basic premise is that entrepreneurship is a central driver of economic renewal and…

This paper seeks to estimate the economic growth effect of constitutional provisions for property rights protection. It does so using the unique situation in formerly communist countries in Central an…

This study tests whether individuals who grow up with parents on welfare benefits are themselves more (or less) likely to be welfare recipients as young adults, compared to individuals who grow up in…

Few would argue that the difficulty in making legislative changes influences policy decisions and often results in less timely and responsive legislation. Despite this, economic research on corporate ta…

Using data on Google searches, I suggest that the spiky nature of electricity markets has a strong effect on searching for information on energy efficiency goods. I identify the informational effect b…

This study examines determinants of chairman compensation in a supervisory board setting and, specifically, the relationship between chairman and CEO compensation. Using a sample of publicly listed firm…

More recently researchers have turned to analyze how the tax structure, rather than the overall tax level, affects economic performance. For instance, several papers have investigated how taxation on…

Tolerance is a distinguishing feature of Western culture: There is a widespread attitude that people should be allowed to say what they want even if one dislikes the message. Still, the degree of tole…

In this paper we challenge the role of Foreign Exchange Risk Management (FXRM) in corporate management. We believe it is fair to characterize FXRM, on the whole, as a legacy activity rather than somet…

We generalize the discussion of the relevant determinants of happiness by asking the question if the same factors, more specifically the same institutional factors, affect happiness and misery. Focusi…

The existing literature on determinants of migration flows typically claims that income differences across countries should be a pushing factor for people's movement. We suggest that institutional qua…

EU-level fiscal rules have not been able to prevent the large-scale accumulation of government debt in many eurozone countries. One explanation was major flaws in the rules. Some of these flaws have n…

The paper describes the monetary and fiscal policy frameworks in Sweden and analyses how they were established as well as current challenges. Sweden provides a good example of how deep economic crisis…

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of collectively agreed increases in minimum wages for manual workers on employment transitions and hours. Design/methodology/approach – Th…

Who becomes a top politician in China? We focus on provincial leaders—a pool of candidates for top political office—and examine how their chances of promotion depend on their performance in office and…

Good health is crucial for human and economic development. In particular poor health in childhood is of utmost concern since it causes irreversible damage and has implications later in life. Recent re…

We propose nuclear capacity auctions as a means to correcting the incentives for investing in nuclear power. In particular, capacity auctions open the market for large-scale entry by outside firms. Req…

The paper answers two questions simultaneously. What is the effect of offshoring on firms' total factor productivity? What is the effect of offshoring on skill-biased technological change? We estimate…

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 document a significant increase in the sorting of workers by cognitive and non-cognitive skills across Swedish firms between 1986 and 2008. The weight of the evidence suggests that the increase in…

Women are often less willing than men to compete, even in tasks where there is no gender gap in performance. Also, many people experience competitive contexts as stressful and previous research has do…

We study the evolution and renegotiation of the cash-flow rights that venture capitalists (VCs) obtain in their portfolio companies. When company performance between financing rounds is poor, subsequent…

In this paper, we study the ways in which affirmative action for one political minority, gender quotas, impact on intersectional representation. In a quantitative analysis of detailed panel data from…

This Ph.D. thesis contains four independent essays summarized as follows. Effects of Competition between Healthcare Providers on Prescription of Antibiotics The introduction of antibiotics as a medica…

The integration of electricity markets around the world has increased the importance of congestion between countries/states and has initiated a discussion of how to harmonize network tariffs. This pap…

Ett debattinlägg av Johan Wennström, IFN, är publicerat i amerikanska City Journal. Wennström skriver att bland de tiggare som blivit ett vanligt inslag i den svenska gatubilden, finns även ensamkomma…

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

This study describes the evolution of capital income taxation, including corporate, dividend, interest, capital gains and wealth taxation, in Sweden between 1862 and 2010. To illustrate the evolution,…

Many articles use regression discontinuity designs (RDDs) that exploit the discontinuity in “close” election outcomes to identify various political and economic outcomes of interest. One of the most i…

Globalization and the transmission of social values: The case of tolerance Tolerance – respecting those who are different – is arguably of particular importance in an era of globalization, where a pot…

We present the revealed preference conditions that characterize the data sets that are consistent with the maximization of a weakly separable utility function. We show that verifying these revealed pr…

Quantifying possible inefficiencies stemming from regulation is important to both policymakers and researchers. We use a dynamic structural model to evaluate the role of local market entry regulations…

Although private equity firms are often criticized for layoffs, little evidence exists regarding which employees lose their jobs and why. We argue that explanations for the job polarization process ca…

Gabriel Heller Sahlgren skriver i en op-ed i Times om den rapport, som han författat om utvecklingen i det finska utbildningssystemet: Real Finnish Lessons: The true story of an education superpower.…

Firms and governments spend billions of dollars on R&D every year. To increase social welfare, the results of R&D must be commercialized so that consumers can benefit from improved products an…

The contribution of different-sized businesses to job creation continues to attract policymakers’ attention; however, it has recently been recognised that conclusions about size were confounded with t…

Do voters respond to political parties' promises or to their past actions? We use a suitable sequence of events in Swedish politics to provide the first answer to this question. In the 1994 election c…

Wholesale electricity markets use different market designs to handle congestion in the transmission network. We compare nodal, zonal and discriminatory pricing in general networks with transmission co…

WTO judges are proposed by the WTO Secretariat and elected to act as ‘judges’ if either approved by the parties to a dispute, or by the WTO Director-General in case no agreement between the parties ha…

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

This paper is an empirical investigation of how traders react to public news in a market where there are lots of non-scheduled announcements, often arriving simultaneously. Using detailed trade inform…

This paper studies the long-term impact of entrepreneurship education and training in high school on entrepreneurial entry, performance, and survival. Using propensity score matching, we compare three…

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…

Current theoretical predictions of how employment protection affects firm productivity are ambiguous. In this paper, I study the effect of employment protection rules on labor productivity using Swedi…

Purpose – The study aims to compare management practices in private and publicly owned elderly care homes. The demands for cost-effective care combined with emphasis on client experience highlights th…

Online Appendix 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 ou…

Recent research has shown that entrepreneurs who start incorporated firms are fundamentally different from entrepreneurs who start sole proprietorships. This difference suggests that incorporation sta…

While previous research documents a negative relationship between government size and economic growth, suggesting an economic cost of big government, a given government size generally affects growth d…

This paper proposes a model of network interactions in the interbank market. Our innovation is to model systemic risk in the interbank network as the propagation of incentives or strategic behavior ra…

This paper studies the long-term impact of entrepreneurship education and training in high school on entrepreneurial entry, performance, and survival. Using propensity score matching, we compare three…

We provide two methods to compute the largest subset of a set of observations that is consistent with the Generalised Axiom of Revealed Preference. The algorithm provided by Houtman and Maks (1985) is…

In this paper, we ask under what conditions norms can enhance welfare by mitigating moral hazard in income insurance. We point out a particular role of norms, namely to compensate for insurers’ diffic…

This paper provides a framework to understand how market size affects firms’ investments in product differentiation in a model of monopolistic competition. The theory proposes that consumers’ love of v…

In endeavouring to explain the empirical puzzle that the sunk costs of exporting are important, but that, at the same time, trade flows do not, on average, survive for very long, this paper explores th…

An increasingly large share of cross-border acquisitions are undertaken by private equity-firms (PE-firms) and not by traditional multinational enterprises (MNEs). We propose a model of cross-border a…

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 crisis. After of…

This paper explores the role of retailers as an urban amenity. Using data for Swedish rural and city municipalities for 2002–2008, ‘accessibility to shops’ measures are constructed for the shops in th…

This paper examines policy measures that foster the creation of innovations with high inherent potential and that simultaneously provide the right incentives for individuals to create and expand firms…

In 2006, Fredrik Reinfeldt led the Swedish Right to power after more than a decade in the wilderness. His star reached its peak as fiscally prudent Sweden weathered the euro-zone crisis well. In the U…

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…

This paper examines the development of taxation in Sweden from 1862 to 2013. The examination covers six key aspects of the Swedish tax system: the taxation of labor income, capital income, consumption…

A recurring theme of the Nobel laureate in economics, Edmund Phelps, is that ”the good life” cannot be achieved through consumption. On the contrary, he believes that a life filled with meaning – a pr…

We study how the quality and instability of institutions and policies affect economic growth in 35 European countries. While stability entails valuable predictability, instability can reflect reforms…

South and Southeast Asia have experienced high economic growth and rapid development over the last couple of decades. This positive development has been accompanied and caused by various changes in ec…

This is a well-written and interesting paper. It is highly informative and I would recommend it to anyone who wants to understand Sri Lanka's modern political and economic history. The paper gives a s…

The so-called 𝑟−𝑔 model of Piketty (2014), which relates the difference between the rate of return on capital, 𝑟, and the rate of income growth, 𝑔 to the level of economic inequality has received…

Unlike many other books on manufacturing or supply chain strategy, the authors’ aim is to explore strategic management challenges around global manufacturing networks. Based on the theoretical underpi…

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.

Entrepreneurship is considered of course to be important. And there’s a common perception that countries that are not good at entrepreneurship have low growth.

Countries do not become rich through innovation; you don’t even become rich by having the best researchers. You become a wealthy country by applying your research in highly efficient companies, compan…

In this chapter, we provide an overview of research on neighborhoods and social networks and their role in shaping behavior and economic outcomes. We include a discussion of empirical and theoretical…

We provide an overview on networks in economics. We first look at the theoretical aspects of network economics using a game-theoretical approach. We derive some results on games on networks and network…

This chapter describes the monetary and fiscal policy frameworks in Sweden and analyses how they were established as well as current challenges. Sweden provides a good example of how deep economic cri…

In recent years, the term “transparency” has emerged as one of the most popular and keenly-touted concepts around. In the economic-political debate, the principle of transparency is often advocated as…

Entrepreneurs perform a central function in today’s decentralized market economies by innovating and exploring new ways to organize factors of production. They are consequently widely believed to play…

We provide an overview and synthesis of the literatures analyzing games in which players are connected via a network structure. We discuss, in particular, the impact of the structure of the network on…

When the Treaty of Maastricht took effect on 1 November 1993, it established a Common Foreign and Security Policy for the European Union (EU). The fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War…

Focusing on North–South trade relations, this chapter explores non-reciprocal trade preferences for developing countries, where the preference-receiving developing countries are not expected to make m…

This paper reviews the long run developments in the distribution of personal income and wealth. It also discusses suggested explanations for the observed patterns. We try to answer questions such as:…

The authors study the evolution of Swedish wealth taxation, since its introduction in 1911 until it was abolished in 2007. The rules concerning the valuation of assets, deductions/exemptions, and tax…

This chapter describes the evolution of capital income taxation in Sweden between 1862 and 2013, including corporate, dividends, capital gains, interest income, and wealth taxation. To illustrate this…

This chapter presents annual Swedish time series data on the top marginal tax wedge and marginal tax wedges on labor income for low-, average-, and high-income earners for the period 1862–2013. The ta…

This chapter studies the evolution of Swedish inheritance taxation from its inception in 1885 to its abolishment in 2004. The basic principles of the tax, including underlying ideas and ambitions, tax…

This chapter gives an introduction to the development of taxation in Sweden from 1862 to 2013, which is examined right through the volume. The contributions in this volume cover six key aspects of the…

This study analyses different forms of discrimination towards individuals in the labor market. In particular, it examines the potential for discrimination of sexual orientation, religion, and physical…

This chapter presents annual Swedish time series data regarding consumption taxes; that is, the indirect taxation of goods and services, for the 1862–2013 period. As a share of total state tax revenue…

This chapter examines the development and role of real estate taxation in Sweden during the period between 1862 and 2010. Real estate has historically been taxed at both the local and state levels in…

For several decades, Sweden has had a relatively high voter turnout, both in relation to the first half of the 20th century and in comparison with other countries. Still, even in this high-turnout con…

The private equity industry has grown immensely during the last three decades. It is a global phenomenon, making private equity firms important owners of corporate assets. So far, the industry has sho…

The purpose of this study is to analyse which kinds of monetary taxation and coinage policies the minting authorities applied in Sweden in the period 1153–1512. In medieval Europe, old coins were freq…

The neoclassical problem of distortionary taxation and the Hayekian knowledge problem are two different lines of argumentation against government interventions. When it applies, the Hayekian argument…

It is commonly argued that a presidential candidate will be helped in a state by having a governor of the same party in office. However, there is little research to support this claim. To address this…

The theory of transformation pressure maintains, by reference to cognitive and emotional factors, that productivity and innovation are stimulated by a decline in actual profits. In periods of increasi…

We demonstrate how commodity producers can take strategic speculative positions in derivatives markets to soften competition in the spot market. In our game, producers first choose a portfolio of call…

World Trade Organization (WTO) judges are proposed by the WTO Secretariat and elected to act as ‘judges’ if either approved by the parties to a dispute, or, by the WTO Director-General in case no agre…

I establish a positive relationship between family ties and civic virtues, as captured by disapproval of tax and benefit cheating, corruption and a range of other dimensions of exploiting others for p…