Publications

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…

Many developing countries would like to increase the share of modern or formal sectors in their employment. One way to accomplish this goal may be to encourage the entrance of foreign firms. They are…

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

The recent literature on the duration of trade has predominantly analyzed the determinants of trade flow durations using Cox proportional hazards models. The purpose of this paper is to show why it is…

The literature on trade facilitation has mostly focused on implications for trade volumes. However, recent theoretical contributions have emphasized that trade costs – such as transaction costs relate…

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…

This study compares average earnings and productivities for men and women employed in roughly 200,000 Chinese industrial enterprises. Women’s average wages lag behind men’s wages by 11%, and this resu…

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…

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

This article consists of three parts. The first part deals with theory. We evaluate the pros and cons of government involvement in urban housing and of renting versus ownership. In the second part, we…

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…

This study examines how globalization of corporate governance practices influences the risk of European CEOs being dismissed. We argue that the harsh monitoring of the American corporate governance sy…

I construct a model of public policy development, and use the model to explain why the United States has a comparatively small public sector, but instead a large "private welfare state" with employmen…

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…

This essay argues that the economic contribution of certain firms – be they small, young or rapidly growing – has to be understood in a broader context of creative destruction. Growth of some firms re…

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 and covering Swed…

This study examines the determinants of citation success among authors who recently published their work in economic history journals. We find that full professors, authors from non-economic history d…

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…

Private equity firms are an important part of the industrial restructuring process. We argue that the key is temporary ownership. Buying to sell induces aggressive restructuring since the equilibrium…

Since emerging from a severe contraction in the early 1990s, the Swedish economy has accumulated a strong record of output growth, outpacing the average growth rate in the Organization for Economic Co…

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…

In this comprehensive evaluation of existing economic research, Andreas Bergh and Magnus Henrekson find that in wealthy countries, where government size is measured as total taxes or total expenditure…

‘In this book, Per Skedinger gives an excellent and balanced survey and evaluation of both the theoretical prediction and the empirical research about the consequences of legislated employment protect…

This 2010 book brings together the 2008 output of the American Law Institute (ALI) project on World Trade Organization Law. Each chapter focuses on a different dispute from the adjudicating bodies of…

Swedish monetary and financial history is fascinating yet perplexing. The authors of this book - economic historians from the universities of Göteborg, Lund, and Stockholm, in co-operation with Sverig…

How and why are firms created, expanded and terminated by entrepreneurs in the knowledge intensive economy? The authors show these entrepreneurship processes are firmly embedded in a given social and…

We survey the literature on social networks by putting together the economics, sociological and physics/applied mathematics approaches, showing their similarities and differences. We expose, in partic…

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

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…

Robin Douhan unexpectedly and tragically passed away on 10 August 2009. His death, at the age of 31, was caused by sudden heart failure. This monograph is a posthumous publication of some of Robin Dou…

Using the concept of market-distribution functions, we derive general optimality conditions for discriminatory divisible-good auctions, which are also applicable to Bertrand games and non-linear prici…

We study the effect of taxation on entrepreneurship, taking into account both the amount of entry and the quality of new ventures. We show that even with risk neutral agents and no tax evasion progres…

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…

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…

Studies of mortgage approvals find that minority borrowers are more likely to be denied loans, even when background variables such as current-year income are held constant. This article demonstrates t…

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…

We examine the effect of firm profits on wages for individual workers while focusing on the empirical complications associated with estimating the extent of rent-sharing. Controlling for worker and fi…

This study examines how Foreign Direct Investments (FDI) and international trade are related, examining the impact of a growing and increasingly integrated world economy on Swedish exports and the for…

Political and legal institutions affect the extent to which the real exchange rates of oil-exporting countries co-move with the oil price. In a simple theoretical model, strong institutions insulate r…

After a severe crisis in the early 1990s, the Swedish economy experienced a boom in productivity growth. Economists have presented three explanations for the fast productivity growth in 1995–2004: mar…

The Industrial Institute of Economic and Social Research (IUI) was founded in 1939. In less than ten years, IUI grew from a small survey bureau to a leading research institute focused on microeconomic…

Recent research has documented that competent-looking political candidates do better in US elections and that babyfaced individuals are generally perceived to be less competent than maturefaced indivi…

We review the recent empirical research assessing market power on the Nordic wholesale market for electricity, Nord Pool. The studies find no evidence of systematic exploitation of system level market…

What explains the world-wide trend of pro-entrepreneurial policies? We study entrepreneurial policy in a lobbying model taking into account the conflict of interest between entrepreneurs and incumbent…

Twins-based estimates of the return to schooling feature prominently in the labor economics literature. The validity of such estimates hinges critically on the assumption that within-pair variation in…

We combine two empirical observations in a general equilibrium occupational choice model. The first is that entrepreneurs have more control than employees over the employment of and accruals from asse…

Public policy is currently shifting from SME policy towards entrepreneurship policy, which supports entrepreneurship without directing attention to quantitative goals and specific firms or employment…

The aim of this paper is to expose the recent developments of urban search models which incorporate a land market into a search-matching framework. Using these models, we will be able to explain why u…

This paper studies determinants of income inequality using a newly assembled panel of 16 countries over the entire twentieth century. We focus on three groups of income earners: the rich (P99–100), th…

Recent research has documented that competent-looking political candidates do better in U.S. elections and that babyfaced individuals are generally perceived to be less competent than maturefaced indi…

Cognitive dissonance theory predicts that the act of voting makes people more positive toward the party or candidate they have voted for. Following Mullainathan and Washington (2009), I test this pred…

In this paper we use newly compiled top income share data to estimate common breaks and trends across countries over the twentieth century. By using the most re-cent structural breaks techniques, our…

Does tax policy affect the rate of self-employment in a modern welfare state? This question is analyzed empirically based on Swedish data for the entire post-war period. Available tax data indicate th…

We develop a theory of commercialization mode (entry or sale) of entrepreneurial inventions into oligopoly, and show that an invention of higher quality is more likely to be sold (or licensed) to an i…

Recent years have witnessed the emergence of a literature examining the effects of giving birth to sons on postmenopausal longevity in pre-industrial mothers. The original paper in this lineage used a…

We use a survey to identify a consumer bias with regard to different sources of debt-financing. Less salient debt may generate psychological benefits. This should be weighed against the possible econo…

Can educational institutions explain occupational choice between wage employment and entrepreneurship? This paper follows Lazear's (2005) Jack-of-all-trades hypothesis according to which an individual…

This paper explores the consequences for quality of introducing yardstick competition in duopoly when a verifiable quality indicator is available. Yardstick competition can be implemented by amenu of…

This paper studies whether the degree of women's representation in Swedish local councils affects local public expenditure patterns. To empirically address this question, I first analyze the difference…

Since July 2007 the world economy has experienced a severe financial crisis originating in the U.S. housing market. The crisis has subsequently spread to the financial sectors in European and Asian ec…

We propose a spatial search-matching model where both job creation and job destruction are endogenous. Workers are ex ante identical but not ex post since their jobs can be hit by a technological shoc…

On January 29, 2009, professor Scott A. Shane, Case Western Reserve University (Cleveland, Ohio), became the first recipient of the Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research, an upgrade of the previo…

The paper estimates the causal effect of trade liberalisation on aggregate productivity through mechanisms related to firm selection. The construction of a bridge in 2000 across the Öresund Strait lin…

This is a game-theoretic analysis of the link between regime type and international conflict. Democratic leaders can credibly be punished for bad conflict outcomes, whereas autocratic leaders cannot.…

A fundamental problem in all political systems is that the people in power may extract rents to the detriment of the general public. In a democracy, electoral competition and information provided by t…

An exemption in the Swedish Employment Security Act (LAS) in 2001 made it possible for employers with a maximum of ten employees to exempt two workers from the seniority rule at times of redundancies.…

We use data from the military enlistment for a large representative sample of Swedish men to assess the importance of cognitive and noncognitive ability for labor market outcomes. The measure of nonco…

This paper discusses allocation of burden of proof in environmental disputes in the WTO system. Besides laying down the natural principles that (i) the complainant carries the burden to (ii) make a pr…

This paper analyzes effects of stronger patent rights on R&D and innovation. It presents a model where the scope of a patent affects an entrant firm's technology choice and thereby the amount of w…

This paper examines the role of the burden of proof (BoP) in National Treatment (NT) disputes under trade agreements. In the situation under study, imports may cause environmental damage, in which cas…