This paper studies studies two-party electoral competition in a setting where no policy is unbeatable. It is shown that if parties take turns in choosing platforms and observe each other's choises, altering one's platform so as to win is pointless since the other party never accepts an outcome...

This paper reconsiders the classical problem of majority voting over tax schedules, adding the possibility to avoid taxes. In this setting preferences over tax schedules are not determined by earned income, but rather by taxable income, which depends on the joint decisions of labor supply and...

This paper considers redistributive as well as political consequences of tax avoidance. When investing in tax avoidance is possible, the official tax rate does not necessarily correspond to what individuals actually pay in taxes. This affects both redistributive outcomes as well as individual's...

This paper shows that whether natural resources are good or bad for a country's development depends crucially on the interaction between institutional setting and the type of resources that the country possesses. Some natural resources are for economical and technical reasons more likely to...

As a contribution to the recent debate about graduate education in Economics, we have surveyed all students enrolled in the Stockholm Doctoral Program in Economics. We believe that this is a good representative of a strong European graduate program which in the early 1990's adopted a US-style...

This paper presents homogenous series of top income shares in Sweden from 1903 to 2003 using individual tax returns data. We find that Swedish top incomes have developed more similarly to the US, Canada and the UK than to other continental European countries when capital gains are included. The...

Entrepreneurship is largely ignored, or treated in a highly simplified way, in endogenous growth theory. Still, it is now widely recognized that the supply of entrepreneurial talent is likely to be important for economic growth, innovation, and job creation. In this study we provide an in-depth...

Our objective is to study the dynamics of the wealth distribution over the path of economic development. More specifically, we are interested in distinguishing between changes which seem to be country specific and characteristics shared by all countries. A historical account of the evolution of...

Using a large, register-based panel data set we study gender differences in top incomes in Sweden over the period 1974–2013. We find that, while women are still a minority of the top decile group, and make up a smaller share the higher up in the distribution we move, their presence has...

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 and the U.S., even though data on explicit historical inheritance flows are only really available for...