Magnus Wikström

Umeå University | UMU · Umeå School of Business, Economics and Statistics

The purpose of this paper is to study whether Swedish admission policies successful in selecting the best-performing students. The Swedish universities select students based on two different instruments, which each form a separate admission group. A regression model is recommended to estimate the achievement differences for the marginally accepted...

Higher Education Admissions Practices - edited by María Elena Oliveri January 2020

Student selection in the Swedish admission to higher education system is based on two fundamentally different performance measures: their criterion-referenced upper secondary grade point average (GPA) and their score on a norm-referenced and multiple-choice admissions test [Swedish admissions test (SweSAT)]. Several student characteristics are know...

This paper studies earnings and labor force participation of native Swedes and recent immigrants in Sweden in response to the childcare reforms of 2001 and 2002 using a difference-in-differences approach and register-based data for the period of 1995!2009. Immigrant and native Swedish mothers are distinguished in order to study if increased accessi...

We study how the optimal public provision of health care depends on whether or not individuals have an option to seek publicly financed treatment in other regions. We find that, relative to the first-best solution, the government has an incentive to over-provide health care to low-income individuals. When cross-border health care takes place, this...

This paper analyzes the implications of social identity and self-categorization in the context of optimal redistributive income taxation. A two-type model is supplemented by an assumption that individuals select themselves into social categories, in which norms are formed and education effort choices partly depend on these norms. Optimal tax policy...

We study how the optimal use of labor income tax progression depends on whether the wage bargaining system is decentralized or centralized. Assuming a nonlinear labor income tax and an unrestricted profit tax, we show that a Utilitarian government is able to implement the first best resource allocation with a zero marginal labor income tax rate und...

The purpose of this study is to find out if the income premium from university entrance differs with respect to prior achievement as measured by previous grades. Using income at the age of 28 to 30, we analyze if high-achievers have larger income premiums from entering university than low-achievers in a sample of Swedish upper secondary school stud...

This paper concerns municipal preferences for state imposed municipal amalgamations. The main purpose of the paper is to study what factors that can explain municipal acceptance or objection of a state imposed amalgamation decision. The empirical analysis is based on the extensive municipal reform in Sweden in 1952. As much as 66 percent of the new...

This paper studies the effects of the Swedish child-care fee reform on public expenditures and taxation in the municipalities. The reform implied a common system of child-care fees among all the municipalities and was introduced in 2002. In order to study its effects, we employ a difference-in-difference approach, where outcomes are compared with r...

Does the local government structure affect population and income growth? An empirical analysis of the 1952 municipal reform in Sweden, Regional Studies. The main purpose of the paper is to analyse if the Swedish municipal reform in 1952 affected subsequent income growth and population movements. The empirical analysis is conducted using data for th...

I rapporten ges en �versikt av forskning om hur ekonomisk politik i vid bem�rkelse p�verkar utbudet av arbetskraft med tonvikt mot den svenska forskningen under de senaste tv� decennierna. Forskningen om arbetsutbud anknyter till flera olika politikomr�den och ber�r s�v�l den offentliga sektorns int�kter som utgifter. F�ljande omr�den behandlas i r...

Rapporten redovisar resultat av genomf�rda studier som belyser de kommunalekonomiska effekterna av reformen maxtaxa, allm�n f�rskola m.m. Inom ramen f�r rapporten redovisas tv� delstudier; en studie av vistelsetiderna inom f�rskola och familjedaghem, och en studie av kommunernas kostnader i f�rskola, skatteuttag och statsbidragens effekter. Vistels...

The purpose of the paper is to study the effects of taxation on dividend payments and ex-dividend price changes in Sweden during 1991-1995. Under this period, dividends and capital gains were taxed at a flat rate. Tax changes in Sweden during the 1990s thus provide an opportunity to include direct measures of the tax treatment of dividends and capi...

In Västerbotten County, Sweden, there are two health centers which (in contrast to all other health centers in the region) bear strict responsibility over their pharmaceutical budget. This study examined whether the prices and quantities of pharmaceuticals prescribed by physicians working at these health centers differ significantly from those pres...

This paper explores the connection between grade inflation and school competition by studying graduates from the Swedish upper secondary schools in 1997. The final grades are compared to the SweSAT national test scores. Single school municipalities are compared with multiple school municipalities in order to study if potential intra-municipal schoo...

The purpose of this paper is to design a test of whether the vertical external effects associated with tax base sharing among local and regional governments have become internalized via the intergovernmental transfer system. Such tests are important in the sense that the income tax rates chosen by different levels of government will generally be co...

This paper studies the determinants of age-specific employment rates among Swedish males, focusing on the effect of education on employment. We use cohort specific data for the time period 1984-1996 covering male cohorts aged 21-45. It is found that aggregate age-group-specific employment rates increase with the proportion of the cohort with an aca...

The purpose of this paper is to estimate the intra-family distribution of income and the individual demand for leisure and household production from Swedish cross-sectional household data. As a basis for the analysis, we use a collective model where each individual is characterized by his or her own utility function and divides total time between l...

This paper analyzes whether households use house interest deductions to minimize family tax payment. By applying a household model in which tax deductions are associated with a cost, we relate the likelihood of minimizing the tax payment to variables associated with the budget constraint and other household characteristics. The results show that 88...

This paper analyzes optimal taxation and risk-sharing arrangements in an economy with two levels of government. Both levels provide public goods and finance their expenditures via labor income taxation, where the tax base is responsive to the private agents' labor supply decisions. The localities are assumed to experience different random productiv...

This paper concerns the regional growth pattern in Sweden, and the purpose is to analyse what factors determine the growth rate of average income and the net migration at the regional level. We find a negative relationship between the initial level of regional average income and subsequent income growth. The results also imply that the initial endo...

This paper analyzes taxes and transfers in an economy with three distinct levels of government. It is assumed that the different levels of government raise revenue through distortionary income taxation, resulting in vertical fiscal externalities. We show how to implement a socially optimal resource allocation when (i) the different levels of govern...

This paper studies the hypothesis that local (municipal) expenditures in part can be explained by the expenditures of the regional (county) government. To accomplish this task, we derive and estimate a model of local public (municipal) spending that is defined conditional on the level of regional public expenditures. The empirical analysis is based...

We introduce a new hybrid approach to joint estimation of Value at Risk (VaR) and Expected Shortfall (ES) for high quantiles of return distributions. We investigate the relative performance of VaR and ES models using daily returns for sixteen stock market indices (eight from developed and eight from emerging markets) prior to and during the 2008 fi...

This paper analyzes optimal taxation and provision of public goods in an economy where tax and expenditure decisions are being made by both central and local governments. The main contribution of the paper is to address the implications of informational asymmetries, such that the central government cannot fully observe differences in local preferen...

This paper studies the effects of local public policy on the distribution of pre-tax income from employment in the Swedish municipalities by estimating an income shares model. Three categories of local public spending are recognized; social expenditures, primary and secondary education expenditures and recreational expenditures. It is found that so...

This paper studies wage determination under piecewise linear taxes in a unionized labor market. The purpose of the paper is to model how piecewise linear taxation affects the choice set of the union and to take this information into account in the estimation. The empirical application is based on panel data. Piecewise linear taxes necessitates form...

This paper deals with local public expenditures, and the analysis is based on cross-section data for the Swedish municipalities. Two models are estimated; one is the basic median voter model where the decisive voter is assumed to be the voter with median income, while the other is a more general statistical alternative. The statistical alternative...

This paper deals with family labour supply under nonlinear income taxation in a life-cycle consistent framework. A major purpose of the paper is, therefore, to bring together previous research on how to model joint supply decisions, life-cycle consistency and piecewise linear taxation, and then perform an econometric application using Swedish cross...

We examine the physical and mental health effects of providing care to an elderly mother on the adult child caregiver. We address the endogeneity of the selection in and out of caregiving using an instrumental variable approach, and carefully control for baseline health and work status of the adult child using fixed effects and Arellano-Bond estima...

This paper estimates two models of wage and employment determination using time-series data for the Swedish construction sector: the monopoly union model and the model of efficient bargaining. The major purpose is to examine whether the models provide a theory consistent description of firm technology and union objectives. This gives a natural fram...