Publications

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.

We estimate the causal effect of wealth on stock market participation using administrative data on Swedish lottery players. A $150,000 windfall gain increases stock ownership probability among pre-lot…

Daniel Rubenson, Ryerson University och affilierad till IFN, skriver tillsammans med två kollegor ett inlägg om det kandensiska valet  i Washington Posts blogg The Monkey Cage. "Många i media misstolk…

Failure to express minority views may distort the behavior of company boards, committees, juries, and other decision-making bodies. Devising a new experimental procedure to measure such conformity in…

Building on a framework introduced by Chaney and Ossa (2013), we construct a task-based model of the firm’s choice of occupational inputs to examine how that choice varies with greater global engageme…

We explore the potential effects of the first leaders of Sub-Saharan Africa. We first outline a set of theoretical reasons for why leaders may matter particularly at the critical juncture of African i…

This study presents a new database, the Swedish National Wealth Database (SNWD), which contains annual data on private, public and national wealth and sectoral saving rates in Sweden over the past two…

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…

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…

The afternoon effect, i.e., that prices in a sequence of auctions with identical items are decreasing with the order in which the auctions are terminated, is a frequently observed phenomenon in empiri…

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…

We experimentally prime subjects subliminally prior to charity donation decisions by showing words that have connotations to prosocial values for a very short duration of time (17ms). Our main finding…

Gesell taxes on money holdings have received attention in recent decades as a way of alleviating the zero lower bound on interest rates. Less known is that such a tax was the predominant method used t…

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 counterpa…

This paper examines the Swedish industrial reorganization process that took place from 1990-2009. We argue that the early adoption of information and communication technology (ICT) in Swedish industry…

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 review and assess the role local institutional framework conditions play in fostering local entrepreneurship. The basic premise is that entrepreneurship is a central driver of economic renewal and…

More recently researchers have turned to analyze how the tax structure, rather than the overall tax level, affects economic performance. For instance, several papers have investigated how taxation on…

Tolerance is a distinguishing feature of Western culture: There is a widespread attitude that people should be allowed to say what they want even if one dislikes the message. Still, the degree of tole…

In this paper we challenge the role of Foreign Exchange Risk Management (FXRM) in corporate management. We believe it is fair to characterize FXRM, on the whole, as a legacy activity rather than somet…

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…

The existing literature on determinants of migration flows typically claims that income differences across countries should be a pushing factor for people's movement. We suggest that institutional qua…

EU-level fiscal rules have not been able to prevent the large-scale accumulation of government debt in many eurozone countries. One explanation was major flaws in the rules. Some of these flaws have n…

The paper describes the monetary and fiscal policy frameworks in Sweden and analyses how they were established as well as current challenges. Sweden provides a good example of how deep economic crisis…

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…

The paper answers two questions simultaneously. What is the effect of offshoring on firms' total factor productivity? What is the effect of offshoring on skill-biased technological change? We estimate…

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…

We document a significant increase in the sorting of workers by cognitive and non-cognitive skills across Swedish firms between 1986 and 2008. The weight of the evidence suggests that the increase in…

Women are often less willing than men to compete, even in tasks where there is no gender gap in performance. Also, many people experience competitive contexts as stressful and previous research has do…

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 Ph.D. thesis contains four independent essays summarized as follows. Effects of Competition between Healthcare Providers on Prescription of Antibiotics The introduction of antibiotics as a medica…

The integration of electricity markets around the world has increased the importance of congestion between countries/states and has initiated a discussion of how to harmonize network tariffs. This pap…

Ett debattinlägg av Johan Wennström, IFN, är publicerat i amerikanska City Journal. Wennström skriver att bland de tiggare som blivit ett vanligt inslag i den svenska gatubilden, finns även ensamkomma…

We show that officer training during the Swedish military service has a strong positive effect on the probability to attain a managerial position later in life. The most intense type of officer traini…

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…

Although private equity firms are often criticized for layoffs, little evidence exists regarding which employees lose their jobs and why. We argue that explanations for the job polarization process ca…

Gabriel Heller Sahlgren skriver i en op-ed i Times om den rapport, som han författat om utvecklingen i det finska utbildningssystemet: Real Finnish Lessons: The true story of an education superpower.…

Firms and governments spend billions of dollars on R&D every year. To increase social welfare, the results of R&D must be commercialized so that consumers can benefit from improved products an…

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…

WTO judges are proposed by the WTO Secretariat and elected to act as ‘judges’ if either approved by the parties to a dispute, or by the WTO Director-General in case no agreement between the parties ha…

Wind power generation of electricity has gained popular support because of its low environmental impact and because of its low costs relative to other renewable energy sources. However, concerns have…

This paper is an empirical investigation of how traders react to public news in a market where there are lots of non-scheduled announcements, often arriving simultaneously. Using detailed trade inform…

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…

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…

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 Swedi…

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…

Online Appendix 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 ou…

Recent research has shown that entrepreneurs who start incorporated firms are fundamentally different from entrepreneurs who start sole proprietorships. This difference suggests that incorporation sta…

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…

In this paper, we ask under what conditions norms can enhance welfare by mitigating moral hazard in income insurance. We point out a particular role of norms, namely to compensate for insurers’ diffic…

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…

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

In this paper, I explore the politically contested association between the degree of capitalism, captured by measures of economic freedom, and the risk and characteristics of economic crisis. After of…

This paper explores the role of retailers as an urban amenity. Using data for Swedish rural and city municipalities for 2002–2008, ‘accessibility to shops’ measures are constructed for the shops in th…

This paper examines policy measures that foster the creation of innovations with high inherent potential and that simultaneously provide the right incentives for individuals to create and expand firms…

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…

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…

This paper examines the development of taxation in Sweden from 1862 to 2013. The examination covers six key aspects of the Swedish tax system: the taxation of labor income, capital income, consumption…

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…

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…

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…

We demonstrate how commodity producers can take strategic speculative positions in derivatives markets to soften competition in the spot market. In our game, producers first choose a portfolio of call…

World Trade Organization (WTO) judges are proposed by the WTO Secretariat and elected to act as ‘judges’ if either approved by the parties to a dispute, or, by the WTO Director-General in case no agre…

I establish a positive relationship between family ties and civic virtues, as captured by disapproval of tax and benefit cheating, corruption and a range of other dimensions of exploiting others for p…

Analysing a reform in the Swedish public sickness insurance, we find that an increased replacement rate for one spouse has a negative cross effect on the other spouse's labour supply. The cross effects…

Corporate boards often change their working language when they acquire foreign members. Consequently, boards “talk” in one language but “think” in another. The present study explores and explains how…

We develop a model where the unemployed workers in the city can find a job either directly or through weak or strong ties. We show that, in denser areas, individuals choose to interact with more peopl…

The EU’s Role in Fighting Global Imbalances looks at the role of the European Union in addressing some of the greatest challenges of our time: poverty, protectionism, climate change, and human traffic…

The contributions in Swedish Taxation examine the development of taxation in Sweden since 1862. Six key aspects of the tax system are covered: the taxation of labor income, capital income, consumption…

Since Finland’s top ranking in the first international PISA league tables in 2001, policymakers from around the world have tried to learn from the unexpected and extraordinary success of its education…

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…