Publications

A key task for economists and policymakers is to predict how markets will respond to regulatory changes. In recent research we analyze the impact of entry regulations on consumers and firms, focusing…

Tolerance – respecting individual choice and differences among people – is a prominent feature of modern European culture. That immigrants embrace this kind of liberal value is arguably important for…

We review the literature on public sector outsourcing to explore if the theoretical predictions from the incomplete contracts literature hold up to recent empirical evidence. Guided by theory, we arra…

Public sector outsourcing, in the form of private production of tax-financed services, is on the increase with economic and social consequences for consumers, taxpayers, and employees. The development…

We are grateful for the comments to our article, and for the opportunity to respond to them. In our original contribution, we argued that the application of the EOE perspective could help make Austria…

We argue that scholars in the Austrian tradition of economics should incorporate the notion of a collaborative innovation bloc into their study of spontaneous market orders. We demonstrate how success…

The variability of solar and wind generation increases transmission network operating costs associated with maintaining system stability. These ancillary services costs are likely to increase as a sha…

Gender identity norms such as the male bread-winner model are possible drivers of persistent gender inequalities in the labour market. However, the extent to which they restrict the behaviour of coupl…

For previously identified weakly separable blockings of goods and assets, we construct aggregates using four superlative index numbers, the Fisher, Sato-Vartia, Törnqvist and Walsh, two non-superlativ…

This paper uses a large-scale two-level randomized experiment to study direct and displacement effects of job search assistance. Our findings show that the assistance reduces unemployment among the tr…

We present the theory of the collaborative innovation bloc (CIB), an evolving system of innovation within which activity takes place over time. We show how the application of the CIB perspective can h…

In recent years, commercial banks have substantially reduced the number of their branch offices. We address the question of whether or not the increased distance to lenders caused by branch office clo…

Recent micro-level studies have suggested that globalization - in particular, economic globalization and trade with China - breeds political polarization and populism. This study examines whether or n…

We develop a model in which ethnic minorities can either assimilate to the majority's norm or reject it by trading off higher productivity and wages with a greater social distance to their culture of…

Although the linear-in-means model is the workhorse model in empirical work on peer effects, its theoretical properties are understudied. In this study, we develop a social-norm model that provides a…

For about 70 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 powe…

Some changes in society are significant enough to warrant a specific name. Digitalization is one of those and is sometimes described as the third industrial revolution. What can we learn from comparin…

Consequences of social trust are comparatively well studied, while its societal determinants are often subject to debate. This paper studies both in the context of Catalan attempts to secede from Spai…

This paper proposes a theory of gazelle growth in which gazelles can grow either organically or through acquisitions. The model includes three types of firms: incumbent, target, and gazelle. We show t…

Proper government reaction to economic crisis has long been a central element of public policy debate and is experiencing a revival after the Great Recession of 2008. Previous studies argue on theoret…

We investigate two parallel school reforms in Sweden to assess the long-run health effects of education. One reform only increased years of schooling, while the other increased years of schooling but…

This article examines gender differences in optimism about the economy. We measure optimism using Swedish survey data in which respondents stated their beliefs about the country’s future economic situa…

A review of The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity by Douglas Murray, Bloomsbury, 280 pages (September, 2019).

Health care in Sweden finds itself at a crossroads as regards digitalization. In this chapter, we will focus on one issue in particular that is causing consternation among primary care physicians: the…

Is the Bayh-Dole intellectual property regime associated with more and better academic entrepreneurship than the Professor’s Privilege regime? The authors examine data on US PhDs in the natural scienc…

The authors cast entrepreneurship as one of three career choices—remaining with one’s employer, changing employers, or engaging in entrepreneurship—and theorize how the likelihood of entrepreneurship…

The literature on innovation systems focuses on the supply side (the creation of technology) rather than on how innovations are converted into economic activity and growth via the market (the demand s…

The 2019 Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research has been awarded to Professor Boyan Jovanovic at New York University in the USA. Boyan Jovanovic has developed pioneering research that advances our…

The Swedish school system suffers from profound problems with teacher recruitment and retention, knowledge decline, and grade inflation. Absenteeism is high, and psychiatric disorders have risen sharp…

We examine the relationship between occupational automation probabilities and employment dynamics over nearly two decades. We show that employment and wage shares of occupations with a higher automati…

Gender identity norms are possible drivers of persistent gender inequalities in the labour market, but the extent to which such norms restrict the behaviour of couples is debated. This column examines…

Henrik Horn, IFN, skriver i World Commerce Review att det inte finns någon inneboende konflikt mellan klimatåtgärder och att slå vakt om det mulitlaterala handelssystemet. Men det kräver att vissa kri…

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…

A substantial body of literature suggests that politicians are blocked from implementing efficient reforms that solve substantial problems because of special interest groups or budget constraints. Des…

The negative aspects of large CEO pay and the associated incentives have been a hot political issue in many countries. Our research identifies some positive aspects of CEO incentives in a broader econ…

We estimate the impact of the 2012 removal of the Canadian Wheat Board’s (CWB) single-desk on the spatial pattern of durum wheat acres in Western Canada. We analyze changes in durum seeded acres with…

Recent studies document a 30-year decline in various measures of dynamism in the US, manifested in a decline in the share of young firms as well as their share of job creation. This column shows that…

Correct estimates of import demand elasticities are essential for measuring the gains from trade and predicting the impact of trade policies. We show that estimates of import demand elasticities hinge…

How can a country improve 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 how t…

Since the early 1980s a wave of liberalizing reforms has swept over the world. Using panel data from 30 European countries in the period 1993–2015, we test the hypothesis that such reforms have led to…

This paper studies the location decisions of the Swedish privately provided independent schools. It makes use of the great expansion of such schools following the 1992 independent school reform, to st…

Purpose: Given the rise of big data and use of analytics, this study explores how the performance measurement systems research field has incorporated dynamic aspects and digitalization prevalent in ra…

This chapter discusses the socioeconomic and technological aspects of blockchain and its implications when adopted in fintech. In particular, we focus on the enablers of digital trust, which is suppor…

We study whether a woman's labor supply as a young adult is shaped by the work behavior of her adolescent peers' mothers. Using detailed information on a sample of U.S. teenagers who are followed over…

We study how friendship shapes students' political opinions in a natural experiment. We use the indicator whether two students were exogenously assigned to a short-term \integration group", unrelated…

We estimate the direct and spillover effects of a large-scale early childhood intervention on the educational attainment of over 2,000 disadvantaged children in the United States. We show that failing…

This paper proposes a theory of gazelle growth in which gazelles can either grow organically or by acquisitions. In the model, there are three types of firms: incumbent, target, and gazelle. We show t…

Capacity mechanisms are increasingly used in electricity market design around the world yet their role remains hotly debated. In this paper, we introduce a new benchmark model of a capacity mechanism…

Our paper presents an empirical analysis of entrepreneurial well-being using a large-scale longitudinal household survey from the UK that tracks almost 50,000 individuals across seven waves over the p…

We employ finely geo-coded firm-level panel data to assess the long-standing question whether agglomeration economies derive from specialization (within-industry), diversity (between-industry) or over…

We analyze a model of R&D alliance networks where firms are engaged in R&D collaborations that lower their production costs while competing on the product market. We provide a complete charact…

In recent years, the number of listed companies has been declining in many countries across the world. This paper provides a selective survey of the literature on the real economic effects of the stoc…

We assess the empirical literature on the determinants of spatial variations in new-firm formation rates by undertaking a systematic empirical analysis of the relative roles of different demand- and s…

In this study we examine the passage of a reform to in-vitro fertilization (IVF) procedures in Sweden in 2003. Following publication of medical evidence showing that pregnancy success rates could be m…

Recently, policy makers worldwide have suggested and passed legislation to ban mobile phone use in schools. The influential (and only quantitative) evaluation by Beland and Murphy (2016), suggests tha…

While workplace flexibility is perceived to be a key determinant of maternal labor supply, less is known about fathers’demand for flexibility or about intra-household spillover effects of flexibility init…

Opponents of big-box entry argue that large retail establishments generate noise and other types of pollution and a variety of negative externalities associated with traffic. Big-box advocates, on the…

This paper examines whether social spending cushions the effect of globalization on within-country inequality. Using information on disposable and market income inequality and data on overall social s…

We are grateful for the comments to our article, and for the opportunity to respond to them. In our original contribution, we argued that the application of the EOE perspective could help make Austria…

This paper investigates the role of gender identity norms in shaping men's and women's time allocation, based on observed behavior following a change in the market penalty for adopting prescriptive no…

Hjertstrand et al. (2016) recently tested weak separability of the direct utility function using U.S. data on consumption goods, leisure, financial and monetary assets. This paper investigates differen…

Background: Empirical research suggests that household debt and payment difficulties are detrimental to mental health. Despite well-known measurement problems that may contaminate analyses using subje…

We estimate the impact of removing an export subsidy on the local economies of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, exploiting the large regional variation of a 1995 reform. We find that the loss of the…

We construct a cross-country dataset spanning 1900–2014 to estimate the tax elasticity of top incomes. Our results show that top tax elasticities vary tremendously over time; they were medium to low b…

This is an extended version of an article published in the anthology Integrating Immigrants into the Nordic Labour Markets, Calmfors. L. and Sánchez Gassen, N. (eds.),  Nordic Council of Ministers, Co…

Tolerance – respecting individual choice and differences among people – is a prominent feature of modern European culture. That immigrants embrace this kind of liberal value is arguably important for…

Coups and regime transitions are events that typically are intended to change the basic institutional framework of a country. Which specific policies change and the consequences of these changes never…

Trust and entrepreneurship are seen as key ingredients of long-term prosperity. However, it is not clear how these two are related. Part of the confusion can be traced back to the measurement of entre…

Beginning in the interwar period, industrial foundations became a vehicle for the corporate control of large listed firms in Sweden, but in the 1990s they were replaced by wealthy individuals who eith…

Zonal pricing electricity markets operate sequentially. First, the suppliers compete in a spot market. Second, to alleviate the congestion in the transmission line, in a redispatch market, the supplie…

Climate change has become a key concern for policy makers, business leaders and individuals all over the world. There exists a broad scientific consensus that the emissions of greenhouse gases, mainly…

The meritocratic fairness ideal implies that inequalities in earnings are regarded as fair only when they reflect differences in performance. Consequently, implementation of the meritocratic fairness…

Do foreign venture capitalists help the domestic economy, or hamper it by slowing down growth, potentially moving economic activity away? This paper addresses this long-standing policy question by exa…

The market-inspired reforms of New Public Management have been particularly pronounced in Swedish local government. Notably, municipally owned enterprises (MOEs) have rapidly grown in numbers. Princip…

While the association between economic freedom and long-run economic growth is well documented, the parallel research literature on the distributional consequences of economic freedom is full of confl…

When should entrepreneurs choose to enter the market with a start-up? And when should they sell their invention or business idea? New research on how entrepreneurs decide between entry and sale offers…

The ongoing discussion regarding blockchain technologies is focused primarily on cryptocurrencies, but blockchain features and functionalities have developed beyond financial instruments. As the techno…

This paper uses administrative data to analyze a large employer-borne payroll tax rate cut for young workers in Sweden. We find no effect on net-of-tax wages of young treated workers relative to sligh…

We study to what degree authors who publish in the five most prestigious journals in economics have previously published there and in which world region they are based. Although still high, the concent…

This study discusses pros and cons of the Swedish international investment agreements from an economic perspective. It concludes that the older Swedish bilateral agreements should be revised to ensure…

This paper examines gender differences in optimism about the economy. We measure optimism using Swedish survey data in which respondents stated their beliefs about the country’s future economic situat…

Since Paul Samuelson introduced the theory of revealed preference, it has become one of the most important concepts in economics. This chapter surveys some recent contributions in the revealed prefere…

This note describes how research on the link between globalization and openness has changed over time. Early contributions assumed that countries develop welfare states to compensate for volatility ca…

The poor performance of credit ratings of structured finance products in the financial crisis has prompted investigation into the role of credit rating agencies. This column discusses the incidence of…

We present a field experiment conducted in order to explore the existence of ethnic discrimination in contact with public authorities. Two fictitious parents, one with a Swedish-sounding name and one…

Are quantitative measures driven by small business activity also valid proxies for high-impact Schumpeterian entrepreneurship? We compile four hand-collected measures of high-impact Schumpeterian entr…

Personal freedom is highly valued by many and a central element of liberal political philosophy. Although personal freedom is frequently associated with electoral democracy, developments in countries…

We provide a nonparametric revealed preference approach to demand analysis based on homothetic efficiency. Homotheticity is widely assumed (often implicitly) because it is a convenient and often usefu…

This paper examines whether and, if so, why source country heterogeneity exists in foreign direct investment. Using detailed Swedish matched employer‐employee data for the period from 1996 to 2009, we…

While the United Nations and NGOs are pushing for global judicialization of economic, social, and cultural rights (ESCRs), little is known of their consequences. We provide evidence of the effects of…

Electricity markets employ different congestion management methods to handle the limited transmission capacity of the power system. This paper compares production efficiency and other aspects of nodal…

Entry by multinational enterprises (MNEs) into emerging markets has increased substantially over the last decades. Many of these MNE entries have taken place in concentrated markets. To capture these…

This analysis suggests that, as in the 1930s and the Second World War, liberalism today is being confronted by “authoritarianism.” In response, the analysis counsels, liberals should either renew thei…

Globalization has increased in recent decades, resulting in structural changes of production and labor demand. This paper examines how the increased global engagement of firms affects the structure of…

Building on recent research in social psychology, this paper analyzes the link between the precision of initial cash offers and mergers and acquisition (M&A) outcomes. About one‐half of the offers…

The present study analyzes the nexus among business growth, ownership structure, and local embeddedness—that is, the involvement of economic actors in a geographically bound social structure—in rural…

Entry by multinational enterprises (MNEs) into emerging markets has increased substantially over the last decades. Many of these MNE entries have taken place in concentrated markets. To capture these…

This study shows that in Sweden, contrary to other European countries, refugees have been disproportionately placed in peripheral and rural areas with high unemployment and rapid native depopulation w…

The European Union officially proclaims to have a common asylum policy. However, the common treaties leave a great deal of discretion to the individual member countries, which allow them to regulate r…

The past provides some guidance on how to handle the effects of technological change on society and the labour market. The question is how much. During the Industrial Revolution, some skilled workers…