This paper documents that increased scarcity right before a payday causally impacts credit choices. Exploiting a transfer system that randomly assigns the number of days between paydays to Swedish social welfare recipients, we find that low educated borrowers behave as if they are more...

Almost two in 10 adults in the U.S. and Europe are, at any moment in time, diagnosed with a mental illness. This paper asks whether mental illness is over- (or under-) diagnosed, by looking at its causal effect on individuals at the margin of diagnosis. We follow all Swedish men born between...

Using employer-employee level data linked to individual health records, we document that the incidence of stress, anxiety, depression, psychiatric medication usage, and even suicide increase following acquisitions. These effects are prevalent among employees from both targets and acquirers, in...

This paper provides novel micro-level evidence that cross-border bank flows are important for households' access to credit not only in emerging markets but also in advanced economies. These foreign bank flows can drive local credit credit booms that increase bank risk. We study how the influx of...

CEOs of large firms filing for bankruptcy are more likely to exit the executive labor market after bankruptcy and experience substantial compensation losses (Eckbo et al., 2016). While the fear of reputational scarring can lead to lower risk-taking and manifest itself as lower rates of...

Does household leverage matter for worker job search, matching in the labor market, and wages? Theoretically, household leverage can have opposing effects on the labor market through debt-overhang and liquidity constraint channels. To test which channel dominates empirically, we exploit the...

Recent research on central bank governance has focused mainly on their monetary policy task. As the sub-prime loan market turmoil reminded us - central banks play a crucial role in financial markets not only in setting monetary policy, but also in ensuring their soundness and stability. In this...

We study a change in the Swedish law that exogenously reduced the value of all outstanding company mortgages, i.e., a type of collateral that is comparable to the floating lien. We explore this natural experiment to identify how collateral determines borrower quality, loan terms, access to...

This paper studies the relation between macroeconomic fluctuations and corporate defaults while conditioning on industry affiliation and an extensive set of firm-specific factors. Using a logit approach on a panel data set for all incorporated Swedish businesses over 1990-2002, we find strong...

A unique legal reform in 2004 in Sweden redistributed collateral rights from banks holding floating liens to unsecured creditors without changing the value of assets on firms' balance sheets. Using a country-wide panel of all incorporated firms, we document that a zero-sum redistribution of...