This essay presents arguments for why precise and reliable estimates of top incomes and top wealth holdings are important for the economic analyses of issues concerning income and wealth distribution. First, I outline the most common theoretical motivations for why a specific focus on the...

How are political events reflected in financial asset prices? Break points in sovereign debt prices are analyzed for Denmark, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Germany and Belgium during 1930-1948, using unique data from the Stockholm Stock Exchange. Unlike in countries involved in WWII, this market was...

This paper analyzes and compares different ways of assessing how people perceived impending threats of war in the past. Conventional Nordic historiography of World War II claims there were few, if any, people in the Nordic countries who perceived a significantly increased threat of war between...

The increased international exchange and competition in modern economics research has boosted the demand for objective and internationally comparable evaluations of institutions and individual researchers. There exist several plausible measures of research performance, each capturing one or...

Nordic historians have asserted for a long time that in the Nordic countries only few people, if any, perceived increased threats of war prior to the World War II outbreak. This would explain, and possibly excuse, why their governments did not mobilize their armies until it was too late. This...

This paper examines the implications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and automation for the taxation of labor and capital in advanced economies. It synthesizes empirical evidence on worker displacement, productivity, and income inequality, as well as theoretical frameworks for optimal taxation....

We investigate the returns to cognitive ability in the labor and capital markets. Using population-wide Swedish military enlistment data and administrative tax records, we find that cognitive ability is much better at predicting capital income than labor earnings. The difference is almost a...