Journal Articles

We provide stylized facts on the existence and dynamics over time of the large firm wage premium for four countries. We examine matched employer-employee micro-data from Brazil, Germany, Sweden, and t…

Welfare effects of entry regulations are theoretically ambiguous in differentiated product markets. We use a dynamic oligopoly model of entry and exit with store‐type differentiation and static price…

We construct multi-country employer-employee data to examine the consequences of last-in, first-out rules. We identify the effects by comparing worker exit rates between different units of the same fi…

The tax laws of most developed countries are debt biased since firms can deduct interest on debt but not on equity. This bias is known to distort investment decisions. However, less is known about how…

Private equity firms (PE firms) have become common owners of established firms in concentrated markets. We show that the threat of a PE acquisition can trigger incumbent mergers in an otherwise mergersta…

We propose a new method to analyze employment and productivity dynamics in a consistent way. Using Swedish data we find that net jobs were mainly created in young, small firms and productivity gains w…

This study examines the governance attributes of post-IPO (initial public offering) retained ownership of private equity in business group constituent firms in contrast to their unaffiliated counterpart…

The VC sector is interesting both in its own right and as a proxy for entrepreneurial finance more broadly. We highlight the tax treatment of stock options as an important factor for variations in the…

We analyze dynamic trading by an activist investor who can expend costly effort to affect firm value. We obtain the equilibrium in closed form for a general activism technology, including both binary a…

Current theoretical predictions of how employment protection affects firm productivity are ambiguous. In this paper, I study the effect of employment protection rules on labor productivity using Swedish…

In recent years, there has been growing concern that multinational enterprises (MNEs) engage in strategic tax planning in order to shift profits to low-tax jurisdictions. This common perception is gen…

Cross-country comparisons of entrepreneurship are difficult due to the lack of standard empirical definitions of entrepreneurship. Measures focusing on small business activity and selfemployment sugge…

Private equity firms (“PE firms”) have become common as owners of established firms in concentrated markets. We discuss the antitrust implications of an active PE market and whether there are any spec…

We show that the firm-size distribution is an important determinant of the relationship between an industry’s employment and output. A theoretical model predicts that changes in demand for an industry…

Global engagement can impact firm organization and the occupations firms need. We use a simple task-based model of the firm’s choice of occupational inputs to examine how that choice varies with globa…

Can a democracy attract competent leaders, while attaining broad representation? Economic models suggest that free-riding incentives and lower opportunity costs give the less competent a comparative a…

We analyse the relationship between international sourcing, measured as imports of intermediate inputs, and the technical efficiency of firms in the information and communications technologies (ICT) m…

I examine whether employment protection affects the willingness of working parents to provide childcare. Using a reform that made it easier for employers to dismiss workers in small firms, I find that…

We exploit close elections in Swedish municipalities to test whether relatives of politicians who become mayors obtain economic benefits. We find no benefits for the siblings of new mayors, but the av…

We investigate to what extent ICT and R&D capital is associated with value added growth in the Swedish business sector. By estimating output elasticities based on data for 47 different industries…

Income inequality in China has been much documented and debated. However, one important aspect of income inequality – social insurance inequality – has been largely understudied. We use a large nation…

Sweden has a school voucher system with universal coverage and full acceptance of corporate providers. Using a value added approach, we find that students at uppersecondary voucher schools on average…

Mergers give acquirers control over the assets of the merged entity and give sellers control over financial assets. We propose a cross-border merger model with home biased financially constrained owners…

We develop a model where party leaders choose the competence of politicians on the ballot to trade off electoral success against their own survival. The predicted correlation between the competence of…

Private equity firms are often criticized for laying off workers, but the evidence on who loses their jobs and why is scarce. This paper argues that explanations for job polarization also explain layo…

By the late 1960s, real effective taxation of income from individual firm ownership in Sweden approached 100 percent. A series of tax reforms has reversed this situation. This paper (1) elucidates the…

We examine how consumers react to the financial distress of durable goods manufacturers by studying the Swedish new car market. We employ a difference-in-differences matching methodology whereby we co…

What does the future hold for the welfare state? An assessment of its ongoing viability in the years to come, and challenge to the idea that it would – or should – be replaced in the foreseeable futur…

A specific monetary tax − called periodic re-coinage − was applied for almost 200 years in large parts of medieval Europe. Old coins were frequently declared invalid and exchanged for new ones based o…

An increasingly large share of cross-border acquisitions are undertaken by private equity-firms (PEfirms) and not by traditional multinational enterprises (MNEs). We propose a model of cross-border acqu…