Publications

As we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Calculus of Consent (Buchanan and Tullock 1962; henceforth denoted CofC), I will dwell on some ways in which it relates to Sweden. At fir…

This study analyzes leading research in behavioral economics to see whether it contains advocacy of paternalism and whether it addresses the potential cognitive limitations and biases of the policymak…

How should the world economy adapt to the increased demand for exhaustible resources from countries like China and India? To address that issue, this paper presents a dynamic model of the world econom…

Realized capital gains are typically disregarded in the study of income inequality. We show that in the case of Sweden this severely underestimates the actual increase in inequality and, in particular…

Workers can have good or bad work habits. These traits are transmitted from one generation to the next through a learning and imitation process, which depends on parents’ investment in the trait and t…

The capacity of the transmission network determines the extent of integration of a multi-national energy market. Cross-border externalities render coordination of network capacity valuable. Is it then…

The aim of this paper is to investigate whether return migrants are more likely to become entrepreneurs than non-migrants. We develop a theoretical search model that puts forward the trade off faced b…

In this dissertation, Martin present four self-contained essays. All essays have the common property of considering how institutions affect workers and their behavior. In Essays I and II, Martin analy…

Since the sinking of the Titanic, there has been a widespread belief that the social norm of “women and children first” (WCF) gives women a survival advantage over men in maritime disasters, and that…

Despite the central role played by human capital in entrepreneurship, little is known about how employees in entrepreneurial firms are compensated and incentivized. We address this gap in the literatu…

In R&D intensive industries, governments promote greenfield foreign investments, while being sceptical towards foreign acquisitions of domestic high-quality firms. We develop a theoretical model t…

This paper analyzes the importance of liquidity in determining security returns for firms listed on the Stockholm Stock Exchange between 1901 and 1919. Using a new and detailed firm-level data set wit…

This paper investigates hypotheses related to efficiency and price uniformity in online competing auctions based on two theoretical predictions from Peters and Severinov [Peters, M., Severinov, S., 20…

Recent empirical evidence shows that cartels are often asymmetric, while cartel theory suggests that firm symmetry is conducive to collusion. Including an indivisible cost of cartelization, we show th…

Does tax policy affect the rate of selfemployment in a modern welfare state? This question is analyzed empirically based on Swedish data for the entire postwar period. Available tax data indicate that…

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, crowdin…

We study the effects of institutional instability on growth. Using principal components analysis, we construct measures of institutional quality and instability from the political risk index of the In…

This article reports results from an experiment studying how FINES, LENIENCY, and REWARDS for whistleblowers affect cartel formation and prices. Antitrust without LENIENCY reduces cartel formation but…

This paper presents new evidence on intergenerational mobility at the top of the income and earnings distributions. Using a large dataset of matched father-son pairs in Sweden, we find that intergenera…

We discuss network neutrality regulation of the Internet in the context of a two-sided market model. Platforms sell broadband Internet access services to residential consumers and may set fees to cont…

The gender gap in earnings is analyzed using data for 250,000 Chinese industrial firms in 2004. The skill-weighted gender wage is estimated to be 12 percent and stems entirely from the female wage dis…

Central banks have been made more independent in many countries. A common rationale has been the existence of a credibility (or lack-of-trust) problem for monetary policy. This indicates a possible an…

The primary objective of most trade agreements is to restrain members' use of trade policies for protectionist purposes. But it would be pointless to restrict the application of border instruments wit…

The purpose of this study is to present to readers with limited training in economics the perspective that most international trade economists bring to the study of trade agreements. It focuses on the…

Preferences are fundamental building blocks in all models of economic and political behavior. We study a new sample of comprehensively genotyped subjects with data on economic and political preference…

Recent theoretical analysis suggests that a reduction in the cost of exporting increases the degree of assortative matching between workers and firms in export-oriented industries. Changes that reduce…

The presence of urban villages is a unique product of China's urbanization. In this article, we explore the effects of urban villages on the formal housing market. For this purpose, we develop a hedon…

Previous research has recognized that weak institutions can hamper investments and alter patterns of trade. However, little is known about the impact of institutional quality on offshoring. This is su…

Tolerance has the potential to affect both economic growth and wellbeing. It is therefore important to discern its determinants. We add to the literature by investigating whether the degree to which e…

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…

We show that every time a local economy generates a new job by attracting a new business in the traded sector, a significant number of additional jobs are created in the non-traded sector. This multip…

Since the sinking of the Titanic, there has been a widespread belief that the social norm of ‘women and children first’ gives women a survival advantage over men in maritime disasters, and that captai…

Recent theoretical analysis suggests that a reduction in the cost of exporting increases the degree of assortative matching between workers and firms in export-oriented industries. Changes that reduce…

We study the impact of the 1918 influenza pandemic on economic performance in Sweden. The pandemic was one of the severest and deadliest pandemics in human history, but it has hitherto received only s…

We construct a model where an entrepreneur can innovate for entry or for sale. It is shown that increased product market competition tends to increase the relative profitability of innovation for sale.…

This article studies whether conformism behavior affects individual outcomes in crime. We present a social network model of peer effects with ex ante heterogeneous agents and show how conformism and d…

In games with continuum strategy sets, we model a player’s uncertainty about another player’s strategy, as an atomless probability distribution over the other player’s strategy set. We call a strategy…

This paper analyzes how institutional differences affect university entrepreneurship. We focus on ownership of faculty inventions, and compare two institutional regimes; the US and Sweden. In the US,…

It is well established within both the economics and power system engineering literature that hydro power can act as a complement to large amounts of intermittent energy. In particular hydro power can…

This paper makes use of individual data for 2004 to 2008 on owners of closely-held businesses in Sweden to estimate the role of both tax and non-tax determinants in the choice to be a closely-held cor…

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…

Social and cultural determinants of economic institutions and outcomes have come to the forefront of economic research. We introduce religiosity, measured as the share for which religion is important…

Relying on Forbes Magazine annual rankings for two decades, 1625 billionaires and their countries of birth and residence are identified, most of whom are self-made entrepreneurs. 13 percent of billion…

In this article, it is pointed out that the European Union does not have a harmonized practice when it comes to trade procedures, implying that countries in the rest of the world face different trade…

Manuscript Type: Perspective Research Question/Issue: In the finance literature theoretical arguments have largely predicted a world-wide convergence towards the Anglo-American model of corporate contr…

David Brady argues that low European poverty rates are a result of the welfare state. His finding relies on a relative measure of poverty, according to which the threshold for being poor differs acros…

One of the major reasons why inventors are awarded patents by governments is they encourage R&D investments and commercialization of inventions. If the patent holder commercializes his/her inventi…

I generalize the workhorse model of network competition to include income effects in demand. Empirical work has shown income effects to be positive and statistically significant. Income effects delive…

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…

We analyze the rate of formation, the characteristics, and the performance of different types of new firms in Sweden over a decade. Comparisons to Denmark, Brazil, and the U.S. suggest that the enviro…

Over the last twenty years we have seen an increasing use of in-work tax subsidies to encourage labor supply among low-income groups. In Sweden, a non-targeted earned income tax credit was introduced…

This paper extends the nonparametric structural method to estimate labor supply developed by Blomquist and Newey (2002) to handle cases in which there are individuals who do not work. The method is th…

This thesis deals with different aspects of competition in retail markets. It consists of four self-contained essays.

We show theoretically that the poor can benefit from price changes induced by higher income inequality. As the number of poor in a society increases, or when the income difference between rich and poo…

We use individual and multi-level data from Zambia on child nutritional health to test the absolute income hypothesis (AIH), the relative income hypothesis (RIH) and the income inequality hypothesis (…

The entry of large (“big-box”) stores and the accompanying drastic decrease in the overall number of stores represent a striking trend in retail. We use a dynamic model to measure the impact of the en…

Using spatial data analysis techniques, we compare the spatial distribution of crime and the black population density across the London boroughs. We show that the higher is the density of the black po…

We survey the literature on venture capital and institutions and present a case study comparing the development of the venture capital market in the US to Sweden. Our literature survey underscores tha…

Many governments promote small businesses for the dual reasons of fostering ‘breakthrough’ innovations and employment growth. In this paper we study the effects of tax and subsidy policies on entrepre…

This paper examines the interaction between intellectual property protection and competition policy on the choice of entrepreneurs with respect to commercialization as well as the rate of innovation.…

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…

Existing studies of entrepreneurship focus on entrepreneurs whose individual contribution to wealth creation is typically trivial: self-employed persons. This paper investigates entrepreneurs whose in…

It is well known that communication often serves as a facilitator for cooperation in static games. Yet, communication can serve entirely different purposes in dynamic settings as communication during…

We showed, in Berggren and Elinder (2012), that tolerance toward homosexuals is negatively and quite robustly related to economic growth. In a comment, Bornhoff and Lee (this issue) question this findi…

We investigate how tolerance, as measured by attitudes toward different types of neighbors, affects economic growth in a sample of 54 countries. Unlike previous studies, by Richard Florida and others,…

Self-employment is the most frequently used measure of entrepreneurship. However, its definition varies between countries, which makes comparisons difficult. We present an analysis of Swedish self-emp…

A number of recent papers have examined the environmental and genetic sources of individual differences in economic and financial decision making. Here we contribute to this burgeoning literature by e…

This paper investigates the causal link between the ethnic diversity in a society and its inhabitants’ preferences for redistribution.We exploit exogenous variation in immigrant shares stemming from a…

This study examines the determinants of citation success among authors who have recently published their work in economic history journals. Besides offering clues about how to improve one's scientific…

This paper studies the relationship between height and leadership. Using data from a representative sample of Swedish men, I document that tall men are significantly more likely to attain managerial po…

Although macroeconomic factors are part of several models for evaluation of credit risk, there is little effort to distinguish between effects of such factors and “intrinsic” factors on changes in cre…

The objective of the paper is to explore and give an overview of two central policy alternatives to improve the integration between the European Union and developing countries by removing barriers to…

At the end of the 1980s, a tri-polar world comprising the US, EU and Japan emerged. However, the economic turbulence of the early 21st century has destabilized this order, and the rise of other Asian…

In this publication, Anders Johnson traces the development and activities of IFN since its inception in 1939 to the present. The Research Institute of Industrial Economics (Institutet för Näringslivs…

This book brings together the 2010 output of the American Law Institute (ALI) project on World Trade Organization law. Each chapter focuses on a different dispute from the adjudicating bodies of the W…

This essential single volume, along with an original introduction by the editors, will be of great interest to researchers and students of management, entrepreneurship and economics and practitioners…

We propose nuclear capacity auctions as a means to improve the incentives for investing in nuclear power. In particular, capacity auctions open the market for large-scale entry by outside firms. Requi…

The Dispute Settlement (DS) system is a central feature of the World Trade Organization (WTO) Agreement. This compulsory and binding two-level mechanism for the adjudication of disputes between WTO Me…

We compare four approaches to network neutrality and network management regulation in a two-sided market model: (i) no variations in Quality of Service and no price discrimination; (ii) variations in…

We look at the effect of importance of religion in daily life on social trust, defined as the share of a population that thinks that people in general can be trusted. We make use of new data from the…

The literature on the relationship between the size of government and economic growth is full of seemingly contradictory findings. This conflict is largely explained by variations in definitions and t…

We develop a dynamic model of identity formation that explains why ethnic minorities may choose to adopt oppositional identities (i.e. some individuals may reject or not the dominant culture) and why…

In the early 1990s the Swedish economy experienced a severe economic and financial crisis which resulted in a substantial GDP decrease. Even though the crisis was not a complete surprise for many econ…

Billions are allocated annually to university research. The increased specialization and international integration of research and researchers has animated the need for comparisons of performance acro…

We analyze the intergenerational transmission of education focusing on the interplay between family and neighborhood effects. We develop a theoretical model suggesting that both neighborhood quality a…

This thesis consists of four self-contained essays. Essay 1: (with Johan Lyhagen) In the first essay, we develop an improved test of economic convergence or divergence using time series methods. The u…

High levels of wind power penetration will tend to affect prices in a deregulated electricity market. Much of the analysis in the literature has focused on the effect that wind power has on average el…

This chapter focuses on the role of corporate financial strategies to improve firms’ market valuations, and thus lower their cost of capital. The identification of successful strategies is accomplishe…

The objective of this paper is to perform an empirical description and analysis of the duration of EU imports from the rest of the world. Toward this aim, we employ a rich data set of detailed imports…

We develop a search-matching model with rural–urban migration and an explicit land market. Wages, job creation, urban housing prices are endogenous and we characterize the steady-state equilibrium. We…