Working Papers

By the late 1960s, real effective taxation of income from individual firm owner­ship in Sweden approached 100 percent. A series of tax reforms initiated in the late 1970s reversed this situation. This…

We study the link between tax progressivity and top income shares. Using variation from large-scale Western tax reforms in the 1980s and 1990s and the novel synthetic control method, we find large and…

We compile data spanning the period 1900–2014 and up to 30 countries to study long-run patterns in the tax elasticity of top incomes. Our results show that top tax elasticities vary tremendously over…

Christmas is when people are expected to act selflessly for the well-being of others, but are people actually more altruistic at this time of the year? Responding to this question poses a challenge be…

The paper studies how stock price misvaluation and financial frictions affect whether an acquisition occurs between or within industries and whether the acquirer pays in cash or stocks. I set up a mod…

There is a need for a conceptual approach that, with reference to explicit micro-level mechanisms and processes of industrial dynamics, articulates the role and function of entrepreneurial experimenta…

The interplay between entrepreneurship and institutions is crucial for economic development; however, the view that institutions determine the extent to which entrepreneurial activity is productive is…

We conduct a contest experiment where participants can invest in increasing both the mean and the spread of an uncertain performance variable. Subjects are treated with different prize schemes and in…

Close to 2 700 state-to-state investment agreements (IIAs) worldwide protect foreign direct investment (FDI) against host country policies. We analyze the design and implications of protection against…

Evasive entrepreneurs innovate by circumventing or disrupting existing formal institutional frameworks. These evasions rarely go unnoticed and usually lead to responses from lawmakers and regulators.…

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…

The overwhelming majority of self-employed individuals are not entrepreneurial in the Schumpeterian sense. To unmistakably identify Schumpeterian entrepreneurs, wefocus on self-made billionaires (in U…

We argue that evasive entrepreneurship is an important, although underrated, source of innovation, and provide the first systematic discussion of the concept. We define evasive entrepreneurship as pro…

Though more than 100 countries have adopted gender quotas, the impacts of these reforms on women’s political leadership remain largely unknown. We exploit a quasi-experiment  – a zipper quota imposed…

This paper studies the evolution of Swedish inheritance taxation since the late nineteenth century to its abolition in 2004. Our contribution is twofold. First, we compute the annual effective inherit…

Inherited wealth has attracted much attention recently, much due to the research by Thomas Piketty (Piketty, 2011; 2014). The discussion has mainly revolved around a long-run contrast between Europe a…

In this study I present empirical evidence that employment in family firms is less sensitive to performance and product market fluctuations, both at the industry and at the firm level. This supports t…

We present a large survey with responses from Swedish firms on their attitudes towards refugees, regarding hiring, job performance, wage setting and discrimination. Generally, firms report positive ex…

This paper reviews the long run developments in the distribution of personal income and wealth. It also discusses suggested explanations for the observed patterns. We try to answer questions such as:…

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…

The contribution of different-sized businesses to job creation continues to attract policymakers’ attention, however, it has recently been recognized that conclusions about size were confounded with t…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

I study the internal organization of firms using occupation data on workers in Swedish manufacturing firms. Firms with more layers are larger in size, in value added, and they pay higher wages. Firms…

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