Working Papers

In this paper, we estimate the causal effect of political power on the provision of public education. We use data from a historical nondemocratic society with a weighted voting system where eligible v…

Entrepreneurship plays a pivotal role for institutional change and economic development in transition and developing economies. Formal and informal institutions in such countries are often sub-par, bu…

This paper proposes new power indices for revealed preference tests. The indices are based on a model of irrational consumption behavior where the consumer randomly allocates a certain fraction of exp…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Empirical studies have estimated a big range of consumption response sizes to changes in house prices. Using a quasi-experiment, we estimate a shock of −19.4 percent to house prices in the area surrou…

We investigate the effect of employment protection legislation (EPL) on the propensity to hire workers from unemployment and active labor market programs (ALMPs), utilizing a reform that decreased dis…

International investment agreements typically permit foreign investors to litigate against host countries (Investor-State Dispute Settlement, ISDS). Yet, common criticism holds that host countries wou…