The tick size regime on systematic internalisers (SIs) was seen as a necessary action to level the playing field between SIs and other trading venues, with the hopes to improve the market composition and market quality in favour of regulated markets. However, the previous literature objects to the view as SIs may have gained the first-mover advantage from their previous tick size exemption. This thesis aims to examine whether the MiFID II tick size regime implementation for SIs on June 26, 2020, alters the market composition and improves the market quality at Nasdaq Stockholm. We consider 45 Swedish stocks with the highest daily average turnover to conduct difference-in-difference regressions. We find that the market quality worsens at Nasdaq Stockholm, while the market composition remains unaffected by the SI tick size regime implementation. The quoted spreads, effective spreads and price impact increase at Nasdaq Stockholm following the SI tick size regime. Impatient traders who trade on information may have rerouted their orders to Nasdaq Stockholm after the event since SIs can no longer offer the avoidance of the price-time priority. Therefore, SIs may have an important role in attracting informed traders who consume rather than supply liquidity. However, the interpretation of the results is conditioned on an inflow of traders from SIs to Nasdaq Stockholm, which we cannot explicitly measure due to the order flow not being adjusted for orders less than the standard market size.

In this paper, I investigate changes in the job market composition during Sweden’s “Golden Age” between the end of WWII and the 1974 oil crisis to examine to which degree this reflects an earlier job polarization than previously thought and validates that era’s anxieties about automation. Drawing from individual income and occupational data from a representative sample of the Swedish population from the year 1940, 1950, 1960 and 1970 and using the Historical International Standard of Classification of Occupations (HISCO) to make the data sets comparable, I demonstrate a general decrease in the share of blue-collar professionals and a general increase in the share of white-collar professionals, as well as a transition from unskilled to semi-skilled and skilled jobs. This indicates skill-biased technological change as the underlying force in the Swedish economy at the time, refuting Gustavsson’s (2017) previous findings regarding an early Swedish job polarization as well as general claims about deskilling. Lastly, using Acemoglu’s (2017) framework for enabling and replacing technologies, I argue the degree to which the pervasiveness of enabling technologies helped shape the Swedish Golden Age has been underappreciated, carrying lessons for our current era of generation-defining technologies and contemporary discussions surrounding automation.