Our purpose in this paper is to examine how one might evaluate and measure the contribution of public infrastructure capital on private sector output and productivity growth in Sweden. We do this by specifying and implementing empirically a number of alternative econometric models, using annual...

Following an era of a development towards earlier retirement, there has been a reversed trend to later exit from the labor market in Sweden since the late 1990s. We investigate whether or not there are potentials, with respect to health and work capacity of the population, for extending this...

Can a democracy attract competent leaders, while attaining broad representation? Economic models suggest that free-riding incentives and lower opportunity costs give the less competent a comparative advantage at entering political life. Moreover, if elites have more human capital, selecting on...

Central banks have evolved for close to four centuries. This paper argues that for two centuries central banks caught up to the strategies followed by the leading central banks of the era; the Bank of England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the Federal Reserve in the twentieth...

Success of immigrants in the US, measured by earnings or education, varies dramatically by country of origin. Surprisingly, immigrants from Algeria have higher educational attainment than those from Israel or Japan. Another fact: The US admits few migrants from Algeria. Immigration slots are...

We study the effect of birth order on personality traits among men using population data on enlistment records and occupations for Sweden. We find that earlier born men are more emotionally stable, persistent, socially outgoing, willing to assume responsibility, and able to take initiative than...

Forward guidance about future policy settings, in the form of a published policy-rate path, has for many years been a natural part of normal monetary policy for several central banks, including the Reserve Bank of New Zealand and the Swedish Riksbank. More recently, the Federal Reserve has...

Thomas Piketty's (2014) book, Capital in the 21st Century, follows in the tradition of the great classical economists, like Marx and Ricardo, in formulating general laws of capitalism to diagnose and predict the dynamics of inequality. We argue that general economic laws are unhelpful as a guide...

This essay aims to explain the nature of monetary and fiscal policy interactions and how those interactions could inform the fiscal rules that countries choose to follow. It makes two points: (1) monetary policy control of inflation requires appropriate fiscal backing; (2) European fiscal...

The objective is to review the evidence on (a) ageing and health and (b) the demand for health- and social services among the elderly. Issues are: does health status of the elderly improve over time, and how do the trends in health status of the elderly affect the demand for health- and elderly...