Popular Science and Book Reviews 2010–2019

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…

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

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Modern electricity markets are characterized by increasing shares of intermittent production which has almost zero marginal costs. The effect of introducing large amounts of cheap power into the syste…

The information structure is particularly dense in electricity markets. Because electricity storage is currently limited, demand and supply have to match at all times, and up-to-date information about…

The transformation of Sweden, from an agricultural society in the mid nineteenth century to one of the world’s richest nations at the start of WWI, was remarkable. Beyond the well-documented increase…

Ever since the first steps towards European integration were taken in the early 1950s, the relationship between the nation-state and the European Union has been a crucial issue. Throughout the years a…

Most OECD countries provide subsidies to stimulate the entry and growth of small entrepreneurial firms. This column argues that a better policy would be to combine these subsidy schemes with policies…

In the last 15–20 years, Sweden has suffered a downturn in several important aspects of the elementary and secondary education system. To begin to illustrate the state of Sweden’s schools, we can make…

A new CEPR working paper investigates how product market competition and gender-specific management career hurdles affect the gender wage gap for managers. The findings suggest that increased product…

The world is in a state of upheaval. In the last decade, much of public debate has been dedicated to global power shifts away from the United States and Europe and towards countries with strong econom…

The responsiveness of high-income earners to taxation is a central aspect of tax system design. This column presents patterns in the tax elasticity of top earners for up to 30 countries over a period…

Ancient Athenians drew lots to determine who served in public office, but oligarchs at that time (and ever since) have argued that there is a trade-off between competence and fair representation. This…

The link between tax progressivity and the income distribution is the subject of intense debate. This column presents new evidence from tax reforms during the 1980s and 1990s to examine how reduced pr…

Most developed economies provide significant subsidies to small businesses to encourage innovation. This column argues that while subsidies to reduce entry costs may increase entrepreneurial entry, th…

In 2016, Sweden came out on top of the Reputation Institute's yearly ranking of 55 countries according to how people viewed them as places to live and work. The same year, Sweden outranked 162 other c…

We argue that institutional changes in a liberalizing direction are a sine qua non for economies of the European Union to become more entrepreneurial in order to promote innovation and economic growth…

Digitalization is sometimes described as the third industrial revolution. What insights can be gained from comparing the present situation to the state of society at the outset of the first industrial…

Nations that have managed to become rich have had institutional features that supported incentives for value creation while ensuring that the ways insiders and special interest groups can extract mono…

There are two key developments in the current labour market in Sweden. On the one hand, there is a strong economic upturn fuelled primarily by domestic demand. This means that the non-tradable sectors…

All three levels of Swedish government are involved in the health care system. At the national level, the Ministry of Health and Social Affairs is responsible for overall health and health care policy…

The question how should the qualifications of students be assessed is one of the most defining and important aspects of any education system.

What is the impact of labour market institutions on entrepreneurial activity? Recently it has been argued that flexible labour market institutions have a positive influence on entrepreneurial activity…

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…

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…

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…

You might think that there is nothing left to be said about this year’s liberal darling liber, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, but Piketty’s opus has just been named the Financial Times’ Business…

In the early 1990s, Sweden introduced one of the most ambitious school-voucher systems in the world. The state still pays for education, but it gives parents the choice to take their voucher to any pu…

No concept has been more significant than ‘social exclusion’ over the last ten years of political debate. Over the decade before that, it was ‘health-schools- social care’ at the centre during several…

"Multiculturalism goes wrong in Sweden" kommenterar National Review Online i samband med publiceringen av en artikel om upploppen i bland annat Husby. Det är IFN-forskarne Tino Sanandaji som menar att…

Electricity supply and consumption are currently undergoing fundamental shifts in many economies. More change will be necessary if ambitious policy objectives are to be realized. For example, the pote…

The Swedish political Right has increasingly managed to recapture the support of a large segment of the chattering classes. There may be lessons for the United States.

Cities exist because proximity facilitates interactions between economic agents. There are few, if any, fundamental issues in urban economics that do not hinge in some way on reciprocal action or infl…

In 1995 the Canadian Government abolished an export subsidy on railway shipments of grain from the Canadian Prairies known as the Western Grain Transportation Act (WGTA). This decision marked the end…

The paper is an interesting effort to address a topical issue considering the 12th Chinese Fiveyear Plan, the global race for inward foreign direct investment (FDI) and for new jobs and the gradual Ch…

One complement to domestic climate policies could be the regulation of carbon dioxide emissions arising during the production of imported products. Such ‘border carbon adjustments’ (BCAs) are said to…

The American Left is far more interested in northern Europe than it is in southern Europe, despite the fact that southern Europe constitutes the majority of the population of the core 15 European Unio…