The paper estimates the causal effect of trade liberalisation on aggregate productivity through mechanisms related to firm selection. The construction of a bridge in 2000 across the Öresund Strait linking Copenhagen with Malmö, Sweden's third largest city, provided a natural experiment with...

No abstract.

In a world with multinational companies (MNC's) changes such as those implied by the realization of EC's internal market will affect the locational choice made by geographically mobile MNC's outside the EC. The reason is that any change which affects the competitive advantage of EC producers...

This paper presents evidence that, in Europe, production of high-tech goods is attracted to large markets, while R&D activities tend to be located away from them. In order to explain this phenomenon, we develop a two-country general equilibrium model where firms make separate choices about the...

We show that every time a local economy generates a new job by attracting a new business in the traded sector, a significant number of additional jobs are created in the non-traded sector. This multiplier effect is particularly large for jobs with high levels of human capital and for high tech...

We study the impact of job proximity on individual employment and earnings. The analysis exploits a Swedish refugee dispersal policy to get exogenous variation in individual locations. Using very detailed data on the exact location of all residences and workplaces in Sweden, we find that having...

No abstract.

Post World War II European welfare states experienced several decades of relatively low unemployment, followed by a plague of persistently high unemployment since the 1980s. We impute the higher unemployment to welfare states' diminished ability to cope with more turbulent economic times, such...

We compare the relation between foreign affiliate production and parent employment in U.S. manufacturing multinationals with that in Swedish firms. U.S. multinationals appear to have allocated some of their more labor intensive operations selling in world markets to affiliates in developing...

What were the asserted complementarities between the welfare state and full-employment policies, and why do these complementarities look less convincing today?