We examine the effects of economic incentives inherent in pension schemes and income security programs on retirement behavior in the Swedish labor market. We use social security wealth and three alternative measures of accrual (one-year benefit accrual, peak value and option value). The social...

This paper analyzes a finite horizon, sequential move pricing duopoly, restricting attention to Markov-strategies. The solution yields stationary patterns, independent of initial conditions, where the reaction-functions follow cycles of three periods. The market price never settles down, and is...

We demonstrate that panel unit root tests can have high power when a small fraction of the series are stationary and may lack power when a large fraction is stationary. The acceptance or rejection of the null is thus not sufficient evidence to conclude that all series have a unit root or that...

Micro data from a dental insurance natural experiment is used to analyze why agents opt out of insurance. The purpose is to relate the dropout decision to new information on risk, acquired by the policy holder and the insurer. The results show that agents tend to leave the insurance when...

This paper studies the relation between fund performance and fund attributes in the Swedish market. Performance is measured as the alpha in a linear regression of fund returns on several benchmark assets, allowing for time-varying betas. The estimated performance is then used in a...

In this paper we derive tests for parameter constancy when the data generating process is non-stationary against the hypothesis that the parameters of the model change smoothly over time. To obtain the asymptotic distributions of the tests we generalize many theoretical results, as well as new...

A bivariate second-order VAR model of money growth and inflation is specified and estimatedby means of least squares. The bias of the parameter estimates is approximated in three ways and new, bias-reduced estimates are computed using the approximations. The effects of bias reduction on...

The double bootstrap provides a useful tool for bootstrapping approximately pivotal quantities by using an "inner" bootstrap loop to estimate the variance. When the estimators are computationally intensive, the double bootstrap may become infeasible. We propose the use of a new variance...

In Sweden, health, measured as self-assessed health, is distributed fairly evenly in an international perspective. The purpose of this paper is to study whether specific disorders and diseases also are distributed fairly evenly. There are 44 diseases or disorders dealt with in this study, from a...

We investigate the dramatic transformation of ownership policies and ownership structure in Sweden during the postwar period. After WWII, Swedish ownership policies were guided by a socialist vision where the ultimate goal was abolition of private ownership. These policies came to an end in the...