We show how characterizing optimal patent policy for the pharmaceutical industry only requires information about generic producers' responses to changes in the effective duration and scope of new drug patents. To estimate these responses, we use data on Paragraph IV patent challenges, and two...

This paper analyzes the long-term effects of potentially avoidable C-sections on children's health. Using Finnish administrative data, we document that physicians perform more unplanned C-sections during their regular working hours on days that precede a weekend or public holiday and use this...

We study a tax evasion response to car taxes in Finland, where used car importers overstate the mileage to reduce tax liability. First, we develop a tax evasion measure by comparing reported mileage upon import with subsequent information from vehicle inspections, and find that a decline in...

We exploit a large-scale natural experiment - the rollout of a nationwide electronic prescribing system in Finland - to study how digitization of prescriptions affects pharmaceutical use and health outcomes. We use comprehensive administrative data from patients treated with benzodiazepines,...

Governments spend large amounts of money to attract firms to their territory, often resulting from bidding wars against other regions. Previous papers show that such bidding wars can improve social welfare by allocating the investment to the regions that value it the most. In this paper, we...

We address the general problem of selection bias, endemic to analyzing the effects of any policy where adoption is voluntary, with empirical application to environmental policies for agriculture. Many voluntary practices for mitigating the environmental impacts of agriculture provide external...

This paper provides estimates and explores the role of own price import demand (Armington) elasticities between different source countries for five agricultural commodities in a framework that incorporates temporal dimension formulated as trading habit persistence. The estimations employ FAO's...

We study rental income tax compliance using a large-scale randomized field experiment and register data with third-party information on the ownership of apartments. We analyze the responses of potential landlords to treatment letters notifying them of stricter tax enforcement, or providing...

This paper estimates the effect of relaxing the social insurance mandate on entrepreneurial activity using rich administrative data from Finland. We find that relaxing the social insurance mandate leads entrepreneurs to reduce their contributions by 16%, which they channel instead into their...

We provide novel stylized facts about competition, bidding, entry and bidders across a wide spectrum of public procurement auctions using comprehensive and rich Finnish data. Competition for publicly procured contracts is relatively low with a median bidder count of two (three conditional on...