Recent studies document a 30-year decline in various measures of entrepreneurship in the United States. In contrast, using detailed Swedish employer-employee data over the period 1990-2013, we find no decline in Swedish entrepreneurial activity. Aggregate net job creation is greatest among the...

This paper examines employment and productivity dynamics in the Swedish business sector during the period 1996-2013. In order to analyze employment and productivity in a consistent way we apply a novel implementation of a method, which previously has been used extensively to analyze job...

We propose a model with asymmetric firms where new technologies displace workers. We show that both leading (low-cost) firms and laggard (high-cost) firms increase productivity when automating but that only laggard firms hire more automation-susceptible workers. The reason for this asymmetry is...

An increasingly large share of cross-border acquisitions are undertaken by private equity-firms (PE-firms) and not by traditional multinational enterprises (MNEs). We propose a model of cross-border acquisitions in which MNEs and PE-firms compete over domestic assets. MNEs' advantage lies in...

Over the past two decades, private equity has contributed to a shrinking of the U.S. stock market. We develop a political economy model of private equity activity to study the wider economic consequences of this trend. We show that private and social incentives to delist firms from the stock...

We extend the literature on exclusive dealing, which assumes that entry can occur only by installing new capacity, by allowing the incumbent and the potential entrant to merge. This uncovers new effects. First, exclusive deals can be used to improve the incumbent's bargaining position in the...

We show that, in the case when innovations are for sale, increased product market competition, captured by reduced product market profits, can increase the incentives for innovations. The reason is that the incentive to innovate depends on the acquisition price which, in turn, might increase...

We provide facts showing that in service markets: (i) restrictions on foreign direct investment (FDI) are under reform, (ii) cross-border Mergers & Acquisitions dominate as the entry mode of FDI, and (iii) there is often a high market concentration. Based on these facts, we present a model for...

We provide a model that explains the following empirical observations: i) private ownership is more efficient than public ownership, ii) privatizations are associated with increases in efficiency and iii) the increase in efficiency predates the privatization. The two key mechanisms explaining...

In their merger control, EU and the US have considered symmetric size distribution (cost structure) of firms to be a factor potentially leading to collusion. We show that forbidding mergers leading to symmetric market structures can induce mergers leading to asymmetric market structures with...