The purpose of this report is to investigate how well competition in the TV-industry works, primarily focusing on distribution. For this purpose we suggest a framework of analysis and, at the same time, we apply this framework to the Swedish market. Even if our focus will be distribution...

A real-options approach was used, incorporating uncertainty and irreversibility of investments, to study the number of stores entering the Swedish retail food market during the period 1994-2002. It was found that uncertainty affected the entry-decision. Entry was less frequent in highly...

The effect of Swedish regional investment grants during 1990-1999 on firm performance, in terms of returns on equity and number of employees, were studied using a propensity-score matching-method to control for sample selection. Firms that received grants did not perform better in terms of...

This paper concerns optimal income taxation under asymmetric information in a two-type overlapping generations model, where people care about their relative consumption compared to others. The appearance of positional concerns affects the policy choices via two channels: (i) the size of the...

Much evidence suggests that people are concerned with their relative consumption, i.e., their consumption in relation to the consumption of others. Yet, the social costs of conspicuous consumption have so far played little (or no) role in savings-based indicators of sustainable development. The...

This paper deals with optimal income taxation and relative consumption under a welfarist government that fully respects people’s preferences and a paternalist government that does not share the consumer preference for relative consumption. Consistent with previous findings, relative...

This paper analyzes optimal differential commodity taxation, together with optimal nonlinear income taxation, in order to deal with positional preferences. It also derives the optimal public provision of private goods both when differential commodity taxation is feasible and when it is not. It...

This paper derives Pareto efficient policy rules for the provision of national as well as global public goods in a two-country world, where each individual cares about relative consumption within as well as between countries. Furthermore, we compare these policy rules with those that follow from...

The optimal provision of a state-variable public good, where the global climate is the prime example, is analyzed in a model where people care about their relative consumption. We consider both keeping-up-with-the-Joneses preferences (where people compare their own current consumption with...

Previous studies on public policy under relative consumption concerns have ignored the role of leisure comparisons. This paper considers a two-type optimal nonlinear income tax model where people care both about their relative consumption and their relative leisure. Increased consumption...