Journal Articles 2010–2019

Exploiting the exogenous variation in user fees caused by a Swedish childcare reform, we are able to identify the causal effect of childcare costs on fertility in a context in which childcare enrollme…

This study investigates the internationalization of corporate boards, using a sample of 346 non-financial listed Nordic firms during 2001–2008. Given a high level of international activity, these firm…

This paper evaluates the effects of a major Swedish school choice reform. The reform in 1992 increased school choice and competition among public schools and led to a large-scale introduction of publi…

Theories of taste-based discrimination predict that competitive pressures will drive discriminatory behavior out of the market. The authors analyze how firm takeovers and product market competition af…

The article argues that focusing only on disputes formally raised in the World Trade Organization (WTO) Dispute Settlement system underestimates the extent of trade conflict resolution within the WTO.…

Over their lifetime, approximately 10% of all women become victims of postseparation stalking or assault. We use a nationally representative survey of separated Swedish women to examine whether men wh…

The objective of this paper is to study when and how much labor and capital income of heirs respond to inheritances. We estimate fixed effects models following direct heirs, inheriting in 2004, during…

In this comment we address a reply to our paper Economides and Tåg (2012) by Caves (2012). Based on data on content providers’ and ISPs’ profits in an oligopolistic market in the US, Caves attempts to…

We present a model that warns against a mechanical comparison of pre- and postmerger prices. The starting point of the article is that both the seller and the buyer take into account how the acquisiti…

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 article is to show why it…

This paper explores the relationship between residential proximity of individuals from the same ethnic group and the probability of finding a job through social networks, relative to other search metho…

This paper consists in 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 su…

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 (Am. Econ. J. Appl. Econ…

This article studies gubernatorial midterm slumps in U.S. state legislative elections. We employ a regression discontinuity design, which allows us to rule out the hypothesis that the midterm slump si…

We provide a model that explains the following empirical observations: (i) private ownership is more efficient than public ownership, (ii) privatizations are associated with increases in efficiency, a…

As we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Calculus of Consent (Buchanan and Tullock 1962; henceforth denoted CofC), I will dwell on some ways in which it relates to Sweden. At fir…

This study analyzes leading research in behavioral economics to see whether it contains advocacy of paternalism and whether it addresses the potential cognitive limitations and biases of the policymak…

How should the world economy adapt to the increased demand for exhaustible resources from countries like China and India? To address that issue, this paper presents a dynamic model of the world econom…

Realized capital gains are typically disregarded in the study of income inequality. We show that in the case of Sweden this severely underestimates the actual increase in inequality and, in particular…

Workers can have good or bad work habits. These traits are transmitted from one generation to the next through a learning and imitation process, which depends on parents’ investment in the trait and t…

The capacity of the transmission network determines the extent of integration of a multi-national energy market. Cross-border externalities render coordination of network capacity valuable. Is it then…

The aim of this paper is to investigate whether return migrants are more likely to become entrepreneurs than non-migrants. We develop a theoretical search model that puts forward the trade off faced b…

Since the sinking of the Titanic, there has been a widespread belief that the social norm of “women and children first” (WCF) gives women a survival advantage over men in maritime disasters, and that…

In R&D intensive industries, governments promote greenfield foreign investments, while being sceptical towards foreign acquisitions of domestic high-quality firms. We develop a theoretical model t…

This paper analyzes the importance of liquidity in determining security returns for firms listed on the Stockholm Stock Exchange between 1901 and 1919. Using a new and detailed firm-level data set wit…

This paper investigates hypotheses related to efficiency and price uniformity in online competing auctions based on two theoretical predictions from Peters and Severinov [Peters, M., Severinov, S., 20…

Recent empirical evidence shows that cartels are often asymmetric, while cartel theory suggests that firm symmetry is conducive to collusion. Including an indivisible cost of cartelization, we show th…

Does tax policy affect the rate of selfemployment in a modern welfare state? This question is analyzed empirically based on Swedish data for the entire postwar period. Available tax data indicate that…

We study the effects of institutional instability on growth. Using principal components analysis, we construct measures of institutional quality and instability from the political risk index of the In…

This article reports results from an experiment studying how FINES, LENIENCY, and REWARDS for whistleblowers affect cartel formation and prices. Antitrust without LENIENCY reduces cartel formation but…

This paper presents new evidence on intergenerational mobility at the top of the income and earnings distributions. Using a large dataset of matched father-son pairs in Sweden, we find that intergenera…

We discuss network neutrality regulation of the Internet in the context of a two-sided market model. Platforms sell broadband Internet access services to residential consumers and may set fees to cont…

The gender gap in earnings is analyzed using data for 250,000 Chinese industrial firms in 2004. The skill-weighted gender wage is estimated to be 12 percent and stems entirely from the female wage dis…

Preferences are fundamental building blocks in all models of economic and political behavior. We study a new sample of comprehensively genotyped subjects with data on economic and political preference…

Recent theoretical analysis suggests that a reduction in the cost of exporting increases the degree of assortative matching between workers and firms in export-oriented industries. Changes that reduce…

The presence of urban villages is a unique product of China's urbanization. In this article, we explore the effects of urban villages on the formal housing market. For this purpose, we develop a hedon…

We construct a model where an entrepreneur can innovate for entry or for sale. It is shown that increased product market competition tends to increase the relative profitability of innovation for sale.…

This article studies whether conformism behavior affects individual outcomes in crime. We present a social network model of peer effects with ex ante heterogeneous agents and show how conformism and d…

In this article, it is pointed out that the European Union does not have a harmonized practice when it comes to trade procedures, implying that countries in the rest of the world face different trade…

Manuscript Type: Perspective Research Question/Issue: In the finance literature theoretical arguments have largely predicted a world-wide convergence towards the Anglo-American model of corporate contr…

David Brady argues that low European poverty rates are a result of the welfare state. His finding relies on a relative measure of poverty, according to which the threshold for being poor differs acros…

One of the major reasons why inventors are awarded patents by governments is they encourage R&D investments and commercialization of inventions. If the patent holder commercializes his/her inventi…

This paper extends the nonparametric structural method to estimate labor supply developed by Blomquist and Newey (2002) to handle cases in which there are individuals who do not work. The method is th…

Using spatial data analysis techniques, we compare the spatial distribution of crime and the black population density across the London boroughs. We show that the higher is the density of the black po…

It is well known that communication often serves as a facilitator for cooperation in static games. Yet, communication can serve entirely different purposes in dynamic settings as communication during…

We showed, in Berggren and Elinder (2012), that tolerance toward homosexuals is negatively and quite robustly related to economic growth. In a comment, Bornhoff and Lee (this issue) question this findi…

We investigate how tolerance, as measured by attitudes toward different types of neighbors, affects economic growth in a sample of 54 countries. Unlike previous studies, by Richard Florida and others,…

Self-employment is the most frequently used measure of entrepreneurship. However, its definition varies between countries, which makes comparisons difficult. We present an analysis of Swedish self-emp…

A number of recent papers have examined the environmental and genetic sources of individual differences in economic and financial decision making. Here we contribute to this burgeoning literature by e…

This paper investigates the causal link between the ethnic diversity in a society and its inhabitants’ preferences for redistribution.We exploit exogenous variation in immigrant shares stemming from a…

This study examines the determinants of citation success among authors who have recently published their work in economic history journals. Besides offering clues about how to improve one's scientific…

This paper studies the relationship between height and leadership. Using data from a representative sample of Swedish men, I document that tall men are significantly more likely to attain managerial po…

Although macroeconomic factors are part of several models for evaluation of credit risk, there is little effort to distinguish between effects of such factors and “intrinsic” factors on changes in cre…

The objective of the paper is to explore and give an overview of two central policy alternatives to improve the integration between the European Union and developing countries by removing barriers to…

We look at the effect of importance of religion in daily life on social trust, defined as the share of a population that thinks that people in general can be trusted. We make use of new data from the…

The literature on the relationship between the size of government and economic growth is full of seemingly contradictory findings. This conflict is largely explained by variations in definitions and t…

We develop a dynamic model of identity formation that explains why ethnic minorities may choose to adopt oppositional identities (i.e. some individuals may reject or not the dominant culture) and why…

In the early 1990s the Swedish economy experienced a severe economic and financial crisis which resulted in a substantial GDP decrease. Even though the crisis was not a complete surprise for many econ…

Billions are allocated annually to university research. The increased specialization and international integration of research and researchers has animated the need for comparisons of performance acro…

We analyze the intergenerational transmission of education focusing on the interplay between family and neighborhood effects. We develop a theoretical model suggesting that both neighborhood quality a…

The objective of this paper is to perform an empirical description and analysis of the duration of EU imports from the rest of the world. Toward this aim, we employ a rich data set of detailed imports…

We develop a search-matching model with rural–urban migration and an explicit land market. Wages, job creation, urban housing prices are endogenous and we characterize the steady-state equilibrium. We…

We are thankful to Michael Lundholm and Mahmood Arai for pointing us towards a coding error which invalidates the regressions in our paper. Correcting the code leads to a decrease in sample sizes, tho…

Endogenous growth theory suggests that technological knowledge stimulates growth, yet the micro-foundations of this process remain obscure. Knowledge spillover theory posits that growth is contingent…

A review of the literature on firm taxation reveals that the economics of entrepreneurship has not sufficiently been taken into consideration. We discuss how this affects conclusions derived from stan…

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…

Does control of patronage jobs significantly increase a political party's chances of winning elections in U.S. states? We employ a differences-in-differences design, exploiting the considerable variat…

We use newly compiled top income data and structural breaks techniques to estimate common trends and breaks in inequality across countries over the twentieth century. Our results both confirm earlier fi…

The WTO leaves discretion over environmental policies to its members, but requests that a fundamental non-discrimination principle is respected: National Treatment (NT). The provision seeks to prevent…

The aim of this paper is to provide a tractable model where both socialization (or network formation) and productive efforts can be analyzed simultaneously. This permits a fullfledged equilibrium/welfa…

Financial market incompleteness and (partial) segmentation of financial markets internationally may endow some firms with a financial advantage which can be exploited through foreign direct investment…

We examine the impact of cross-border acquisitions on intra-firm wage dispersion using a detailed Swedish linked employer-employee data set including data on all firms and about 50% of the Swedish lab…

We develop an urban-search model in which firms post wages. When all workers are identical, there is a unique wage in equilibrium even in the presence of search and spatial frictions. This wage is aff…

The financial crisis starting in 2008 made many European countries opt for a change of exchange rate regime. The choice of price measure as an entry requirement to the European Economic and Monetary Un…

Foreign direct investment (FDI) has been important in the growth and global integration of developing economies. Both Northeast and Southeast Asia, especially the latter, have been part of this develo…

A robust positive correlation between height and intelligence, as measured by IQ tests, has been established in the literature. This paper makes several contributions toward establishing the causes of…

This paper investigates labor productivity growth and the contribution to labor productivity growth in Swedish manufacturing during the diffusion of electric motors and ICT. The paper distinguishes be…

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

In this paper, I investigate whether instead of strengthening home-based production, government R&D-subsidies can induce R&D-intensive firms to locate production abroad. Investigating firm-level…

We develop a regional model where, in the city, unemployment prevails because of too high (efficiency) wages, while, in the rural area, workers are paid at their marginal productivity. We characterize…

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

Using data from the UK Quarterly Labor Force Survey, this paper examines the job finding methods of different ethnic groups in the UK. Our empirical findings suggest that, though personal networks are a…

(i) François Lévêque and Howard Shelanski, (eds.), Antitrust and Regulation in the EU and US: Legal and Economic Perspectives (Cheltenham, UK, and Northamprton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2009), reviewed by La…

We study the relationship between ethnic identity and labour market outcomes of non-EU immigrants in Europe. Using the European Social Survey, we find that there is a penalty to be paid for immigrants…

This paper analyses a wholesale electricity market with supply function competition. Trade in the forward and spot markets is represented by a two-stage game, and its subgame perfect Nash equilibrium…

The World Trade Organization (WTO) is the busiest state to state court nowadays. It is a rarity in international relations since it includes compulsory third-party adjudication and a permanent second…

A recurring theme in evaluations of Swedish residential youth care is that treatment is often unplanned. Using a data set of teenagers placed in youth care in 1991 (N = 357), we show that planned trea…

We use data from the Swedish military enlistment to assess the importance of cognitive and noncognitive ability for labor market outcomes. The measure of noncognitive ability is based on a personal in…

This paper attempts to measure the size of South–South foreign direct investment (FDI) in developing East Asia and the trends in it, the characteristics of the investing countries, and the investments…

Do voters tend to underestimate the costs of government spending? Several features of its tax system make Sweden unusually well suited for testing the proposition that voters systematically misperceiv…

This article surveys the literature and adds to the evidence on the impact of employment protection legislation on employment. While stringent employment protection contributes to less turnover and jo…

The Industrial Institute for Economic and Social Research (Industriens Utredningsinstitut, IUI) was founded in 1939. In less than ten years, IUI grew from a small survey bureau to a leading research i…

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…

Individuals differ in how they construct their investment portfolios, yet empirical models of portfolio risk typically account only for a small portion of the cross-sectional variance. This paper asks…