Publications

This paper uses panel data on bilateral FDI stocks in the European Union to empirically analyze the impact of labor and corporate taxations on FDI decisions. While the effect of corporate taxes on FDI…

The most common reason for scrapping a wind turbine in Denmark is to make room for a newer turbine. The decision to scrap a wind turbine is then highly dependent on an opportunity cost that comes from…

Anecdotal evidence indicates that electricity producers use production failures to disguise strategic reductions of capacity in order to influence prices, but systematic evidence is lacking. We use a…

We conduct a laboratory experiment where third-party spectators can re­distribute resources between two agents, thereby offsetting the conse­quences of controllable and uncontrollable luck. Some spect…

Transparency has become a catchword and in the economic-political debate it is often seen as a universal remedy for all sorts of problems. In this paper, we analyze and discuss the meaning and use of…

The purpose of this study is to test for the effects of trade promotion via the foreign service. We develop a Melitz-based model where firms are heterogeneous with respect to productivity and must pay…

We examine how interaction choices depend on the interplay of social and physical distance, and show that agents who are more central in the social network, or are located closer to the geographic cen…

This study contributes to the debate concerning the appropriate role of multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) in WTO dispute settlement. It seeks to address this relationship in light of the re…

Does rainfall during the Election Day reduce voter turnout? Previous research shows that in the US one inch of rain reduces turnout with about one percentage point. We turn to the Swedish context in o…

This essay contributes in two ways to the literature on the effects of economic circumstances on health. First, it deals with reverse causality and omitted variable bias by exploiting exogenous variat…

We investigate the effects of organizational culture and personal value orientations on performance under individual and team contest incentives. We develop a model of regard for others and in-group f…

We analyse in a theoretical framework the link between real-time and day-ahead market performance in a hydro-based and imperfectly competitive wholesale electricity market. Theoretical predictions of…

Existing empirical evidence suggests that entrepreneurs are optimists, a finding researchers often interpret as evidence of a behavioral bias in entrepreneurial decision-making. We revisit this claim…

Tolerance – respecting those who are different – is arguably of particular importance in an era of globalization, where a potential for economic, social and personal development is increasingly a func…

The objective of this essay is to study to what extent parents divide their estates unequally between their children and the determinants of this decision. We use a new dataset based on the estate rep…

Gabriel Heller Sahlgren, IFN and Center for Market Reform of Education, and Julian Le Grand, London School of Economics, argue that competition between schools can force laggards to improve: "In fact,…

We analyse network competition in a market with international calls. National regulatory agencies (NRAs) have incentives to set regulated termination rates above marginal cost to extract rent from int…

This paper describes the evolution of capital income taxation in Sweden between 1862 and 2013, including the taxation of corporate profits, dividends, capital gains, interest income, and wealth taxati…

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…

Entrepreneurship policy mainly aims to promote innovative Schumpeterian entrepreneurship. However, the rate of entrepreneurship is commonly proxied using quantity-based metrics, such as small business…

This article analyzes a rich Swedish data set with information on the electoral turnout of a large sample of adoptees, their siblings, their adoptive parents, and their biological parents. We use a si…

Political campaigns employ complex strategies to persuade voters to support them. We analyse the contributions of elements of these strategies using data from a field experiment that randomly assigned…

We revisit the question how inward FDI and multinational ownership affect relative labor demand. Motivated by the recent literature that distinguish between skills and tasks, we argue that the impact…

This paper uses data from Forbes Magazine’s list of billionaires, supplemented with other publicly available information, to study the migratory behavior of the very rich. Billionaires are more likely…

The Nordic countries are known for their well-functioning public administrations. In indices measuring control of corruption and the quality of the rule of law, they frequently occupy top positions. H…

Preferential voting has been introduced in a number of proportional election systems over the last 20 years, mainly as a means to increase the accountability of individual politicians. But most of the…

In 2007, the Swedish employer-paid payroll tax was reduced substantially for young workers. We estimate the labor market response for different ages, and at different phases of the business cycle. The…

We study the evolution of modern Swedish wealth taxation since its introduction in 1911 until it was abolished in 2007. A thorough description of the rules concerning valuation of assets, deductions/e…

This essay uses Edmund Phelps’ new book Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge, and Change (Princeton University Press, 2013) as inspiration to discuss innovation and entr…

This article examines power issues for the ADF and four break models (Perron, 1989; Zivot and Andrews, 1992) when the DGP corresponds to one of the break models. Choosing to test an incorrect break mo…

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…

While baseline testosterone has recently been implicated in risk-taking in men, less is known about the effects of changing levels of testosterone on financial risk. Here we attempt to influence testost…

The aim of this article is to explore the structure of cities as a function of labor differentiation, gains to trade, a fixed cost for constructing the transportation network, a variable cost of commo…

This article investigates whether public funds should support R&D and if so, how such support should be designed in order to be efficient and to comply with the legal requirements stated in EU law…

This paper finds evidence that more democratic political institutions increase trust. Second generation immigrants with ancestries from 115 countries are studied within 30 European countries. Comparin…

Twins-based estimates of the return to schooling have featured prominently in the economics of education literature. Their unbiasedness hinges critically on the assumption that within-pair variation i…

In response to high and enduring youth unemployment, large payroll tax cuts for young workers were implemented in two Swedish reforms in 2007 and 2009. This paper analyses the effects of the reforms o…

Economic growth necessitates extensive churning and restructuring, the bulk of which is about shifts from less to more successful firms within the same industry. Labor market institutions favoring rea…

Policy makers should recognize that self-employment and innovative entrepreneurship are not synonymous; and that policies which encourage self-employment not necessarily promote entrepreneurship. This…

Diversity in qualifications and examinations is a unique feature of the English, Welsh, and Northern Irish education landscapes. Contrary to the prevailing view, the authors of this volume take as the…

For some, Sweden is proof that a generous welfare state is fully compatible with a growing competitive economy. For others, it is a frightening example of what big government can do to a once thriving…

This is one of the first reference works to survey existing research on transparency and explore its meaning and significance in different areas. It provides an up-to-date account of existing work on…

This chapter presents historical evidence about Swedish stock prices, dividends, and yields on government fixed-interest securities. Monthly returns are presented since 1901 for stocks, since 1874 for…

In this report, we study the ownership structure of large Finnish firms. We make an overview of the evolution of corporate ownership in Finland from the 1970s to today, and contrast the Finnish settin…

The debate about nuclear power focuses mostly on safety, environmental costs for nuclear waste and climate benefits due to reduced carbon emissions. A further potentially important aspect is the conse…

There is an on-going debate as to whether health is negatively affected by economic inequality. Still, we have limited knowledge of the mechanisms relating inequality to individual health and very lit…

This study provides the first empirical test of strategic interactions in the pricing decisions of regulated utilities. Since publicly owned water utilities in Sweden are governed by a cost-of-service…

Using World Bank data on institutional quality and the KOF Globalization Index, we examine over 100 countries from 1992 to 2010 to analyze the relationship between economic and social globalization an…

We study sex trafficking in a marriage market model of prostitution. When traffickers can coerce women to sell sex, trafficked prostitutes constitute a non-zero share of supply in any unregulated mark…

When a decision-maker’s attention is limited, her decisions depend on what she focuses on. This gives interested parties an incentive to manipulate not only the substance of communication but also the…

The cross-country correlation between social trust and income equality is well documented, but few studies examine the direction of causality. We show theoretically that by facilitating cooperation, t…

This paper analyzes how the possibility to complement social income insurance schemes with private insurance affects the political support for social insurance. It is shown that political support for…

Gabriel Heller Sahlgren, som är affilierad till IFN, tar sig an Finlands Pasi Sahlberg i ett debattinlägg. Sahlberg hävdar att "val, konkurrens och ansvarstagande har spridit sig som ett virus runt om…

Theoretically, there are several reasons to expect education to have a positive effect on health and empirical research suggests that education can be an important health determinant. However, it has…

This paper provides micro-level evidence on the relationship between labor market conditions and social insurance participation among Chinese industrial firms. I find that the increased scarcity of la…

Research on entrepreneurship has flourished in recent years and is evolving rapidly. This article explores the history of entrepreneurship research, how the research domain has evolved, and its curren…

In this paper we treat an individual’s health as a continuous variable, in contrast to the traditional literature on income insurance, where it is assumed that the individual is either able or unable…

Since at least the 1960s, the European Union (EU) has offered various kinds of non-reciprocal trade preferences for developing countries. Originally, these trade preferences had at least two policy go…

Revealed preference tests are widely used in empirical applications of consumer rationality. These are static tests, and consequently, lack ability to handle measurement errors in the data. This paper…

We study risk taking on behalf of others in an experiment on a large random sample. The decision makers in our experiment are facing high-powered incentives to increase the risk on behalf of others th…

This paper finds evidence that more democratic political institutions increase trust. Second generation immigrants with ancestries from 115 countries are studied within 30 European countries. Comparin…

Matthew Yglesias skriver i Slate (som ägs av The Washington Post Company) att det "per capita stora antalet svenska miljardärer visar att en generös välfärdsstat inte utesluter entreprenörskap". Tino…

Foreign direct investment has been of great importance in economic growth and global economic integration over the last decades. South East Asia has been part of this development with rapidly increasi…

The Swedish economy has developed rapidly since the mid-1990s relative to most comparable countries, in particular relative to almost all other EU-15 countries. We investigate two policy areas that ar…

Efforts to increase female political representation are often thought to be at odds with meritocracy. This paper develops a theoretical framework and an empirical analysis to examine this idea. We sho…

This study examines globalization of monitoring practices by focusing on how American (U.S.) influences on European firms impact the dismissal risk for these firms’ CEOs. Specifically, we argue that t…

I study the internal organization of firms using Swedish occupation data. The empirical patterns match the theoretical predictions of Caliendo and Rossi-Hansberg (2012) and are similar to the patterns…

I ett debattinlägg i The telegraph skriver Gabriel Heller Sahlgren som är affilierad till IFN, att de inte finns bevis för att obehöriga lärare är sämre än behöriga. Han menar att eftersom vi inte har…

We use a dynamic oligopoly model of entry and exit to evaluate how entry regulations affect profitability and market structure in retail. The model incorporates demand and store-level heterogeneity. B…

This paper estimates the role of both tax and non-tax determinants in the choice in Sweden to be a closely-held corporation vs. a proprietorship, using individual data for 2004 to 2008 on owners of cl…

This study contributes to the debate concerning the appropriate role of multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) in in WTO dispute settlement. Its distinguishing feature is that it seeks to addres…

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

According to the ‘law of dispersion’, the level of inequality in political participation is higher when voter turnout is low. We empirically test this hypothesis by evaluating levels of voter turnout…

Few EU decisions have caused more international outcry than the extension of the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS) to apply to aviation. The directive was legally challenged by US airlines before a UK…

Almost all WTO dispute panels exceed their statutory time limits. This is often seen to indicate a more general problem for panels to manage their tasks. The time required varies considerably across p…

Scholars have previously investigated country and organizational-level factors associated with the incidence of female directors on boards. These studies, however, cannot explain why, in countries wit…

This paper presents annual Swedish time-series data on the top marginal tax wedge and marginal tax wedges on labor income for a low-, average- and high-income earners for the period 1862 to 2013. The…

We study risk taking on behalf of others, both with and without potential losses. A large-scale incentivized experiment is conducted with subjects randomly drawn from the Danish population. On average…

We test whether people’s tendency to stick with the default option can help save resources. In a natural field experiment we switch printers’ default settings, from simplex to duplex printing, at a la…

Multinational corporations internationalize their corporate boardrooms in order to capitalize on their commercial and financial internationalization. Board internationalization provides access to spec…

Although the leaf-thin bracteates are the most fragile coins in monetary history, they were the main coin type for almost two centuries in large parts of medieval Europe. The usefulness of the bractea…

It is well-known that observed data on prices and quantities of a set of goods is consistent with rational choice if the data satisfy revealed preference. In this paper, we derive estimators for deman…

Swofford and Whitney (1987) investigated the validity of two types of assumptions that underlie the representative agent models of modern macroeconomics and monetary economics. These assumptions are u…

The People's Republic of China (PRC) is currently promoting indigenous technology development through support of Chinese firms and, arguably, by restricting operations of foreign multinational firms.…

We model patent-signaling by informed venture capitalists to incumbent acquirers of developed innovations. We show that, to signal, venture capitalists develop more patents with higher impact than inc…

This paper experimentally investigates free-riding behavior on communication cost in a coordination game and finds strong indications of such free-riding. Firstly, the subjects wait for others to send…

Theoretically, there are several reasons to expect education to have a positive effect on health. Empirical research suggests that education can be an important health determinant. However, it has not…

We cast entrepreneurship as one of three career choices – remaining with one’s employer, changing employers, or engaging in entrepreneurship – and theorize how the likelihood of entrepreneurship evolv…

The literature on trade facilitation has mostly focused on implications for trade volumes. However, recent theoretical contributions have emphasized that trade costs – such as transaction costs relate…

The performance of new firms is important for economic development but research has produced limited knowledge about the key relationships among growth, profitability, and survival for new firms. Based o…

Many developing countries would like to increase employment in the formal sectors. One way to accomplish this goal may be to encourage the entrance of foreign firms. We examine employment growth in In…

An important challenge facing many deregulated electricity markets is dealing with the increasing penetration of intermittent generation. Simulation studies have pointed to the advantages of trading c…

Most government bureaucracies in developed countries use civil service systems. What accounts for their adoption? We develop and test a model of bureaucratic reforms under repeated partisan competitio…

Green certificates are the main instrument for promoting renewable electricity (RES-E) in Sweden. But certificates cover only a limited share of total RES-E production. Under partial coverage, crowding…

In most electricity markets generators must submit step-function offers to a uniform price auction. These markets are often modelled as simpler pure-strategy Supply Function Equilibria (SFE) with cont…

I analyze renewable electricity policy in a multinational electricity market with transmission investment. If national policy makers choose support schemes to maximize domestic welfare, then a trade p…

What triggers growth? How can the EU Member States ensure conditions that have a proven positive effect on growth? These questions are relevant, not least considering the recent financial and economic…