<p>This thesis consists of four self-contained essays in economics. <i>Tournaments and unfair treatment</i>. This paper introduces the negative feelings associated with the perception of being unfairly treated into a tournament model and examines the impact of these perceptions on workers’ efforts and their willingness to work overtime. The effect of unfair treatment on workers’ behavior is ambiguous in the model in that two countervailing effects arise: a negative impulsive effect and a positive strategic effect. The impulsive effect implies that workers react to the perception of being unfairly treated by reducing their level of effort. The strategic effect implies that workers raise this level in order to improve their career opportunities and thereby avoid feeling even more unfairly treated in the future. An empirical test of the model using survey data from a Swedish municipal utility shows that the overall effect is negative. This suggests that employers should consider the negative impulsive effect of unfair treatment on effort and overtime in designing contracts and determining on promotions.<i> </i></p><p><i>Late careers in Sweden between 1970 and 2000</i>. In this essay Swedish workers’ late careers between 1970 and 2000 are studied. The aim is to examine older workers’ career patterns and whether they have changed during this period. For example, is there a difference in career mobility or labor market exiting between cohorts? What affects the late career, and does this differ between cohorts? The analysis shows that between 1970 and 2000 the late careers of Swedish workers comprised of few job changes and consisted more of “trying to keep the job you had in your mid-fifties” than of climbing up the promotion ladder. There are no cohort differences in this pattern. Also a large fraction of the older workers exited the labor market before the normal retirement age of 65. During the 1970s and first part of the 1980s, 56 percent of the older workers made an early exit and the average drop-out age was 63. During the late 1980s and the 1990s the share of old workers who made an early exit had risen to 76 percent and the average drop-out age had dropped to 61.5. Different factors have affected the probabilities of an early exit between 1970 and 2000. For example, skills did affect the risk of exiting the labor market during the 1970s and up to the mid-1980s, but not in the late 1980s or the 1990s. During the first period old workers in the lowest occupations or with the lowest level of education were more likely to exit the labor market than more highly skilled workers. In the second period old workers at all levels of skill had the same probability of leaving the labor market.<i> </i></p><p><i>The growth and survival of establishments: does gender segregation matter?</i> We empirically examine the employment dynamics that arise in Becker’s (1957) model of labor market discrimination. According to the model, firms that employ a large fraction of women will be relatively more profitable due to lower wage costs, and thus enjoy a greater probability of surviving and growing by underselling other firms in the competitive product market. In order to test these implications, we use a unique Swedish matched employer-employee data set. We find that female-dominated establishments do not enjoy any greater probability of surviving and do not grow faster than other establishments. Additionally, we find that integrated establishments, in terms of gender, age and education levels, are more successful than other establishments. Thus, attempts by legislators to integrate firms along all dimensions of diversity may have positive effects on the growth and survival of firms. </p><p><i>Risk and overconfidence – Gender differences in financial decision-making as revealed in the TV game-show Jeopardy.</i> We have used unique data from the Swedish version of the TV-show <i>Jeopardy</i> to uncover gender differences in financial decision-making by looking at the contestants’ final wagering strategies. After ruling out empirical best-responses, which do appear in Jeopardy in the US, a simple model is derived to show that risk preferences, the subjective and objective probabilities of answering correctly (individual and group competence), determine wagering strategies. The empirical model shows that, on average, women adopt more conservative and diversified strategies, while men’s strategies aim for the greatest gains. Further, women’s strategies are more responsive to the competence measures, which suggests that they are less overconfident. Together these traits make women more successful players. These results are in line with earlier findings on gender and financial trading.</p>

This thesis consists of four self-contained essays in economics. Tournaments and unfair treatment. This paper introduces the negative feelings associated with the perception of being unfairly treated into a tournament model and examines the impact of these perceptions on workers’ efforts and their willingness to work overtime. The effect of unfair treatment on workers’ behavior is ambiguous in the model in that two countervailing effects arise: a negative impulsive effect and a positive strategic effect. The impulsive effect implies that workers react to the perception of being unfairly treated by reducing their level of effort. The strategic effect implies that workers raise this level in order to improve their career opportunities and thereby avoid feeling even more unfairly treated in the future. An empirical test of the model using survey data from a Swedish municipal utility shows that the overall effect is negative. This suggests that employers should consider the negative impulsive effect of unfair treatment on effort and overtime in designing contracts and determining on promotions. Late careers in Sweden between 1970 and 2000. In this essay Swedish workers’ late careers between 1970 and 2000 are studied. The aim is to examine older workers’ career patterns and whether they have changed during this period. For example, is there a difference in career mobility or labor market exiting between cohorts? What affects the late career, and does this differ between cohorts? The analysis shows that between 1970 and 2000 the late careers of Swedish workers comprised of few job changes and consisted more of “trying to keep the job you had in your mid-fifties” than of climbing up the promotion ladder. There are no cohort differences in this pattern. Also a large fraction of the older workers exited the labor market before the normal retirement age of 65. During the 1970s and first part of the 1980s, 56 percent of the older workers made an early exit and the average drop-out age was 63. During the late 1980s and the 1990s the share of old workers who made an early exit had risen to 76 percent and the average drop-out age had dropped to 61.5. Different factors have affected the probabilities of an early exit between 1970 and 2000. For example, skills did affect the risk of exiting the labor market during the 1970s and up to the mid-1980s, but not in the late 1980s or the 1990s. During the first period old workers in the lowest occupations or with the lowest level of education were more likely to exit the labor market than more highly skilled workers. In the second period old workers at all levels of skill had the same probability of leaving the labor market. The growth and survival of establishments: does gender segregation matter? We empirically examine the employment dynamics that arise in Becker’s (1957) model of labor market discrimination. According to the model, firms that employ a large fraction of women will be relatively more profitable due to lower wage costs, and thus enjoy a greater probability of surviving and growing by underselling other firms in the competitive product market. In order to test these implications, we use a unique Swedish matched employer-employee data set. We find that female-dominated establishments do not enjoy any greater probability of surviving and do not grow faster than other establishments. Additionally, we find that integrated establishments, in terms of gender, age and education levels, are more successful than other establishments. Thus, attempts by legislators to integrate firms along all dimensions of diversity may have positive effects on the growth and survival of firms. Risk and overconfidence – Gender differences in financial decision-making as revealed in the TV game-show Jeopardy. We have used unique data from the Swedish version of the TV-show Jeopardy to uncover gender differences in financial decision-making by looking at the contestants’ final wagering strategies. After ruling out empirical best-responses, which do appear in Jeopardy in the US, a simple model is derived to show that risk preferences, the subjective and objective probabilities of answering correctly (individual and group competence), determine wagering strategies. The empirical model shows that, on average, women adopt more conservative and diversified strategies, while men’s strategies aim for the greatest gains. Further, women’s strategies are more responsive to the competence measures, which suggests that they are less overconfident. Together these traits make women more successful players. These results are in line with earlier findings on gender and financial trading.

We examine a model of social learning in networks following the lines of Bala and Goyal (1998, 2001). As a model of agents' behaviour we have chosen the model of informational cascades of Bikhchandani et al (1992). Similarly to Bala and Goyal we find that the higher the 'degree of integration' within the society is, the more likely it is that conformity of actions will arise. However, unlike their results our model suggests that in the presence of informational externalities globalisation of informational flows, expressed in the increasing density of communication channels in a network, may drive down the expected social welfare. (author's abstract) / Series: Working Papers Series "Growth and Employment in Europe: Sustainability and Competitiveness"

Este trabajo tiene por objetivo el indagar acerca de las causas que originaron cambios en la distribución de los ingresos laborales en Argentina a lo largo de la década del ’90. Numerosos trabajos para otros países parecen confirmar la tesis de que las nuevas tecnologías (o simplemente, “cambio tecnológico”) intensivas en la utilización de mano de obra calificada parecen tener gran parte del peso explicativo de la tendencia al aumento en las primas salariales que perciben los trabajadores más calificados. Este estudio va a aportar evidencia directa que concuerda con esta hipótesis frente a otras esbozadas anteriormente para el caso argentino que hacen hincapié en la liberalización comercial que tuvo lugar en el país desde principios de los 90. Para ello se presentan distintos testeos de las hipótesis explicativas de cambio tecnológico y apertura comercial, con énfasis especial en la evidencia empírica de microdatos (EPH) durante el período 1992-1999. Los resultados confirman la idea de que el cambio tecnológico parece tener un mayor peso a la hora de explicar la tendencia a la desigualdad en los ingresos laborales por grupo educativo.

This paper studies five mergers in the European wireless telecommunication industry and analyzes their impact on prices and capital expenditures of both merging carriers and their rivals. We find substantial heterogeneity in the relationship between increases in concentration and carriers' prices. The specifics of each merger case clearly matter. Moreover, we find a positive correlation between the price and the investment effect; when the prices after a merger increase (decrease), the investments increase (decrease) too. Thus, we document a trade-off between static and dynamic efficiency of mergers.

In this paper we explore the process of adoption and enforcement of a number of new information processing technologies, such as the typewriter, calculators, tabulation gears and book-keeping machines, starting from the 1880s in the United States. We show that their innovation and diffusion was inexorably coupled to the economic development in the USA in the late 19th century. It is a complex and contradictory consequence of underlying socio-economic processes that led to the formation of modern organisational structures in large scale manufacturing which required systematic and efficient information processing. The typewriter and all the complementary office automation devices that entered the scene shortly after were part of a socio-technical regime that started being established: the office work regime or as we prefer to call it the first IT regime, as for the first time a technology was set up to process information on large scale. The logic of large scale manufacturing to produce standardised products in large series and to apply labour saving techniques was cast into the organisation of administration. This required a convergence of technical practices. The lock-in to the inferior QWERTY-keyboard is hence the outcome of the diffusion and hardening of the First IT Regime. (author's abstract) / Series: Working Papers Series "Growth and Employment in Europe: Sustainability and Competitiveness"

Basic experimental studies of the injection of liquid fuel into a two dimensional flowfield designed to represent a sudden-expansion "dump" combustor were performed under cold-flow conditions. Test conditions were as follows: 0.6 entrance Mach number, 25 PSIA total pressure, and nominally 75°F stagnation temperature. Two step heights were investigated, 1.0 in. and 0.5 in., corresponding to area ratios of 1.33 and 1.17. The investigation included Pitot and static pressure distributions, spark and streak shadowgraphs, surface flow visualization, direct photographs and videotape recordings. The backlighted streak and spark shadowgraphs were used to obtain jet penetration and break-up information. Oil drop surface flow studies showed details of the flow in the recirculation region behind the step. The injectant for these cold flow studies was selected as water, which was injected transversely to the air flow 1.0 in. and 0.5 in. upstream of the step at various flow rates. It was found that both the location of the injection port relative to the step and the step height had no measurable effect on jet penetration and break-up. Injectant accumulation on the combustor wall in the base-flow region was found to be substantial under some conditions, and the amount of accumulation was shown to be a strong function of initial liquid jet penetration height. / M.S.

This article presents a framework within which the effects of demographic change on both agglomeration and growth of economic activities can be analyzed. I introduce an overlapping generation structure into a New Economic Geography model with endogenous growth due to learning spillovers and focus on the effects of demographic structures on long-run equilibrium outcomes and stability properties. First, life-time uncertainty is shown to decrease long-run economic growth perspectives. In doing so, it also mitigates the pro-growth effects of agglomeration resulting from the localized nature of learning externalities. Second, the turnover of generations acts as a dispersion force whose anti-agglomerative effects are, however, dampened by the growth-linked circular causality being present as long as interregional knowledge spillovers are not perfect. Finally, lifetime uncertainty also reduces the possibility that agglomeration is the result of a self-fulfilling prophecy. (author's abstract) / Series: Department of Economics Working Paper Series

Technological search is often depicted to be random. This paper takes a different view and analyses how innovative recombinant search is triggered, how it is done and what initial conditions influence the final design of technological artefacts. We argue that complementarities (non-separabilities) play an important role as focusing devices guiding the search for new combinations. Our analysis takes the perspective of technology adopters and not that of inventors or innovators of new products. We illustrate the process of decomposition and re-composition under the presence of binding complementarity constraints with a historical case study on the establishment of the First IT Regime at the turn of the 19th century. (author's abstract) / Series: Working Papers Series "Growth and Employment in Europe: Sustainability and Competitiveness"

This paper presents a theoretical framework along "Classical" lines in which Schumpeter's concept of "Creative Response" is linked to a theory of induced innovation and the concept of technological regimes. We devote particular attention to the role of indivisibilities between factors of production. On the basis of this framework, we study the adoption of early information technologies, such as typewriters, calculators or Hollerith machines in US manufacturing in the period between 1870 and 1930. We show how the presence of a distinct bias in technical change in US manufacturing led to the opening of a window of opportunity for early information technologies, and how the presence of this bias influenced the technological search and adoption process of firms and how this found its final reflection in the rules and heuristics of the new regime. (author's abstract) / Series: Working Papers Series "Growth and Employment in Europe: Sustainability and Competitiveness"