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ABSTRACTTo identify the relevant product markets for Swedish pharmaceuticals, a spatial econometrics approach is employed. First, we calculate Moran's Is for different market definitions and then we use a spatial Durbin model to determine the effect of price changes on quantity sold of own and competing products. As expected, the results show that competition is strongest between close substitutes; however, the relevant product markets for Swedish pharmaceuticals extend beyond close substitutes down to products included in the same class on the four‐digit level of the Anatomic Therapeutic Chemical system as defined by the World Health Organization. The spatial regression model further indicates that increases in the price of a product significantly lower quantity sold of that product and in the same time increase the quantity sold of competing products. For close substitutes (products belonging to the same class on the seven‐digit level of the Anatomic Therapeutic Chemical system), as well as for products that, without being close substitutes, belong to the same therapeutic/pharmacological/chemical subgroup (the same class on the five‐digit level of the Anatomic Therapeutic Chemical system), increased competition is also visible after 1 July 2009 when the latest policy changes with regards to pharmaceuticals have been implemented in Sweden.

A natural experiment is used to identify the causal relationship between employment protection legislation and fi…rm growth. The natural experiment occurred in Sweden in 2001, when an exemption made it possible for fi…rms with less than eleven employees to exclude two workers from the last-in-fi…rst-out principle when dismissing personnel. The estimated average treatment effect of the reform show that the number of employees increased with 0.135 percent in fi…rms with 5-9 employees relative to fi…rms with 10-15 employees, which corresponds to over 5,000 additional jobs per year created by the reform. Firms with ten employees, just below the size threshold, became 3.4 percent less likely to increase their workforce to a level surpassing the threshold, indicating that the last-in-…first-out rule prevented these …firms from growing. Thus, employment protection legislation seems to act as a growth barrier for small fi…rms.

We examine if the Nordic power market, Nord Pool, has been competitive or if electricity suppliers have had market power. Specifically, since the evolution from national markets to a multi-national and largely deregulated power market has taken place stepwise, we also examine how the degree of market power has evolved during this integration process. The Bresnahan-Lau method together with weekly data during 1996-2004 are used in the analysis, which shows that electricity suppliers have had small, but statistically significant, market power, but that the market power has been reduced as the Nord Pool area has expanded.

In 2007, the Swedish government tried to prevent firms from underreporting their wage payments by implementing a reform that required restaurants and hairdressers to have staff registers. Employers were required to provide detailed information on when their employees were working, and the Swedish Tax Authority was also given a mandate to carry out unannounced control visits and to impose fines on firms that had not properly filled out their staff registers. We estimate the effect of this reform on firms' wage reporting using propensity score matching combined with a difference-in-differences analysis. Then, we compare the increase in tax revenues with the costs that the staff register system generated for the firms and the Swedish Tax Authority. Our results show that the total costs of the system exceeded the increase in tax revenues by approximately 355 million SEK ($36.6 million) over a four-year period, even when utilizing point estimates that are likely to overstate the effect on wage reporting. We thus conclude that considering the costs associated with the reform, the staff register reform is not economically justified.

The purpose of this paper is to study whether investors' willingness to realize capital gains falls when the marginal tax rate on capital gains is raised. We use a rich register-based panel data set covering almost 8% of the Swedish population. The results indicate that a 10% increase in capital gains tax rate reduces the number of realizations of capital gains with 8.7% and the realized amount, given the decision to realize, with 1.9%. In addition, we find that wealthy individuals seem to respond more to changes in capital gains tax rates than less-wealthy. Adapted from the source document.

Many European countries have abolished mandatory audits for small firms to reduce the regulatory and administrative burden for these firms. However, we still lack knowledge on whether such legislative changes affect employment growth for those firms that become free to choose to have external audits. We investigate this question using a Swedish reform that made audits voluntary for small firms fulfilling certain requirements. The reform created an almost ideal natural experiment, which we use to evaluate the effects of voluntary audits on employment growth for small firms using a difference-in-difference estimator. We find that firms which fulfilled the requirements for voluntary auditing, compared to a control group of similar firms that did not, increased their employment growth rate by 0.39%. This corresponds to 1,830 jobs being created in the year following the reform, suggesting that mandatory audits act as a growth barrier for small firms.