An important issue in the debate on voucher systems and school choice is what effects competition from independent schools will have on public schools. Sweden has made a radical reform of its system for financing schools. Independent and public schools operate on close to equal terms under a...

What explains the world-wide trend of pro-entrepreneurial policies in the last few decades? We study entrepreneurial policy in a lobbying model taking into account the con.ict of interest between entrepreneurs and incumbents. It is shown that international market integration leads to more...

We examine the effect of corruption on foreign direct investments. Our model shows that corruption may have different effects on investments aimed at selling to a local market, in comparison to investments aimed at selling from the corrupt market. Using Swedish firm-level data, we find that...

In this paper, we use data from a corruption survey conducted among top politicians and high level civil servants in 290 Swedish municipalities in 2007 to investigate the effects of government size on corruption. We construct several measures of corruption based on the survey, and combine these...

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This paper carries out a critical reappraisal of the two contending theories purporting to explain long-run government spending: Wagner’s Law and different variants of the ratchet effect. We analyze data spanning from the early 19th century until the present day in Sweden and the United...

We characterize pension systems along three dimensions: 1) actuarial vs. non-actuarial, 2) funded vs. pay-as-you-go, 3) defined-contribution vs. defined-benefit. Increasing the degree of actuarial fairness, by strengthening the linkage between contributions and benefits, reduces labor market...

The analysis provides a new explanation for two widespread problems concerning European unemployment policy: the disappointingly small effect of many past reform measures on unemployment, and the political difficulties in implementing more extensive reform programs. We argue that the heart of...

The paper discusses the consequences for the functioning of different pension systems of various types of socioeconomic changes, mainly demographic developments, variations in productivity growth and changes in real interest rates. Two of the pension systems have exogenous and four have...

In an analysis of the risk-sharing properties of different types of pension systems, we show that only a fixed-fee pay-as-you-go (PAYG) pension systems can provide intergenerational risk sharing for living individuals. Under some circumstances, however, other PAYG pension systems can enhance the...