We study the returns to political office using data from Finnish parliamentary elections in 1970-2007 and municipal elections in 1996-2008. The discontinuity of electoral outcomes in individual candidate votes allows us to estimate the causal effect of being elected on subsequent income. Getting...

We study hiring in a labor market where worker ability can only be observed on-the-job, but quickly becomes public information after labor market entry. We show that firms in these markets have a socially inefficient incentive to hire low talented, experienced workers instead of more promising...

We investigate divisions within the citation network in economics using citation data between 1990 and 2010. We consider all partitions of top institutions into two equal-sized clusters, and pick the one that minimizes cross-cluster citations. The strongest division is much stronger than could...

We estimate the effect of getting elected on future income development of political candidates. We present a bootstrap approach for measuring electoral closeness, which can be used to implement a regression discontinuity design in any electoral system. We apply the method to the Finnish...

This study of markups, ie prices over marginal costs in manufacturing industries, builds on the work of Robert Hall and Werner Roeger.We analyze several methods used in estimating sectoral markups, and then apply them to empirical analysis of the industrial sectors of six EU countries (Germany,...

In this study, we analyse variation of markups in Finnish industrial sectors, both between industries and over time.The study finds evidence that:Since the beginning the 1980s, practically every Finnish industrial sector has been able to extract a positive markup.The average industrial markup...