Journal Articles 2010–2019

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…

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.…

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…

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 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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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 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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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 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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…