The paper examines policy externalities between imperfectly competitive open economies where unemployment prevails in general equilibrium. We develop a two-country and two-sector model with monopolistic competition in the goods market and wage bargaining in the labor market. Policy externalities...

The increased demand for a more equal parental sharing of the responsibilities for children has led many countries to reconstruct their parental leave systems so to provide stronger incentives for fathers to participate in childcare. Father’s quotas are becoming widely spread across Europe....

In this paper I investigate the relevance of the exchange rate regime for macroeconomic stability. I simulate hypothetical macroeconomic developments under different regimes in Sweden during the period 1972 -1996. The main question is how stable output would have been if Sweden had had a...

Two major methods of explaining economic institutions, namely by strategic choices or through (indirect) evolution, are compared for the case of a homogenous quadratic duopoly market. Sellers either can provide incentives for agents to care for sales, or evolve as sellers who care for sales in...

In this paper we study the capital adjustment process in Swedish manufacturing firms and relate the empirical findings to standard models of firm behavior in the presence of impediments to capital adjustments. We find that (i) a model with irreversible capital goes a very long way in capturing...

This paper first formulates a model of how the politicians in a local government collectively lobby to raise intergovernmental grants to their local government. The model identifies a relationship between council size and grants received. I then study this relationship empirically using the...

Using daily data for the Swedish stock market for almost the last two decades no distinct and firm deterministic seasonal pattern for the conditional volatility for the Swedish stock market has been found. The daily turnover in the Swedish stock market has an impact on and eliminates to some...

The effect of a general school choice reform on student performance is studied in a Swedish institutional setting. A rich set of individual level data allows estimation of a value added specification, mitigating problems with omission of relevant variables. Increased school competition is shown...

What determines the structure of labour market institutions? This paper argues that common explanations based on rent sharing are incomplete; unions, job protection, and egalitarian pay structures may have as much to do with social insurance of otherwise uninsurable risks as with rent sharing and...

In this essay a customer market model is constructed, where an entrepreneur-owned firm has two choice variables, namely the customer stock and the capital stock. The firm is assumed to be completely credit rationed and the investment procedure is characterised by time-to-build. The model is...