This paper explores the dynamics of press freedom around events that threaten or oust the incumbent regime of a country. While democracies on average grant the press more freedom, our theoretical starting point is that democracies and autocracies may have similar incentives to protect the power...

Liberalization is widely recognized to drive productivity growth. Retail trade is often thought to substantially contribute to the frequently debated productivity gap between Europe and the U.S. In Europe, entry regulations empower local authorities to decide on the entry of new stores. We use a...

The Swedish school system suffers from profound problems with teacher recruitment and retention, knowledge decline, and grade inflation. Absenteeism is high, and psychiatric disorders have risen sharply among Swedish pupils in the last ten years. In this pioneering analysis of the consequences...

Many countries have implemented quasi-markets to enhance entrepreneurship and innovation in welfare service provision. However, the benefits have generally been limited; this can also be observed in Sweden, a country which stands out for its extensive use of quasi-markets. Based on the Swedish...

This essay argues that the most crucial institution of any school system is its view of knowledge - from which virtually all other aspects of a school are derived: the content of its curricula, its pedagogical practices, and the incentives that motivate its members. To make this case, we outline...

Can competition and the existence of profit-seeking actors in the school market improve educational quality? To see cost-efficient, long-term improvements, we identify the school system’s capacity for knowledge-enhancing innovation as crucial and explore this question by examining Swedish...

Social and cultural determinants of economic institutions and outcomes have come to the forefront of economic research. We introduce religiosity, measured as the share for which religion is important in daily life, to explain institutional quality in the form of property rights and the rule of...

We examine how variation in antisemitism across countries can be explained by economic freedom. We propose two mechanisms. First, the more economic freedom, the greater the scope of market activities. If people perceive the consequences of the market economy as detrimental, they will be more...

Religious beliefs and practices influence individual lives and societies in many ways. We study how religion affects self-assessed health, which in turn is important for both individual well-being and productivity. A religious background predicts worse health. As the previous literature has not...

This paper analyzes the effect of an increase in patent scope on R&D and innovation. It presents a model where patent scope affects an entrant firm's technology choice and thereby creates a trade-off between R&D investments and wasteful duplication of R&D. The model predicts that an increase in...