I rapporten analyserar författarna hur arbetet med regelutformning i Sverige skulle kunna utvecklas. De pekar på att regelutformning inte primärt är ett juridiskt problem, utan en samhällsekonomisk analysfråga där samhällsekonomisk effektivitet måste genomsyra och prägla arbetet med regelutvärdering och regelgivning.

This chapter examines ownership and control of Swedish companies. Sweden witnessed a significant increase in ownership concentration in the top 20 and top 100 firms in the past few decades. Equity ownership concentration remained virtually the same in listed companies. A few major ownership patterns may be documented. First, the large shareholders remained the dominant corporate governance model in Sweden. Second, the largest domestic shareholders, such as families and holding companies (closed-end investment funds) have persisted in the past few decades. Third, there was an increase in the share of foreign owners as the largest shareholders in both the top 100 and listed companies. Fourth, there was also an emergence of new entrepreneurs as the largest shareholders in the large Swedish companies. The chapter has documented both the persistence of corporate insiders and ownership changes (e.g. an increase in foreign ownership, establishment of new domestic largest individual shareholders) in the past few decades. It also shows the importance of domestic institutional investors. It discusses a few reasons why the ownership structure remains persistent despite the substantial influence of global market forces, liberalization of domestic markets and corporate governance and legal reforms in Sweden.

Sverige har under lång tid haft hög invandring och i dag är andelen utrikes födda nästan 20 procent av befolkningen. En stor andel av dessa invandrare har inte etablerat sig på den svenska arbetsmarknaden, vilket medfört att Sverige 2018 hade det högsta sysselsättningsgapet mellan inrikes och utrikes födda i Europa. Nästan hälften av de utrikesfödda med icke-västerländsk bakgrund är inte självförsörjande, och många har inga inkomster alls. I flera grupper ser det dessutom betydligt värre ut.

I denna bok ställer vi frågor om vad utanförskap och en låg självförsörjningsgrad får för konsekvenser för ekonomin, för den svenska modellen, samt för tilliten i samhället.

This comprehensive Handbook presents thoughtful analysis on how regulations can impact innovation within a number of fields and markets, and provides a greater understanding of regulatory complexity and the challenging task it presents for future research. The Handbook of Innovation and Regulation embraces some of the key policy areas such as the regulation of markets, critical sectors, and global and regional aspects, focussing particularly on those regulations which target innovation. Reviewing these often interconnected policy areas in terms of both macroeconomic and microeconomic issues, this Handbook expertly studies how regulations in differing fields can affect innovative activities. By placing innovation centre stage, the contributors emphasise the direct and indirect effects of imposed regulations. Further, they illustrate the critically important overall impact of innovation to make firms competitive, promote economic growth and increase societal welfare. Addressing research and policy challenges, this Handbook would be an excellent resource for academics in regulatory economics, innovation and entrepreneurship, international trade, regional economics as well as environment and digitisation and policymakers in both national and international organisations. © Pontus Braunerhjelm, Martin Andersson, Knut Blind and Johan E. Eklund 2023. All rights reserved.

This chapter surveys the literature on the effects labor market regulations on innovation, technological change and productivity growth. We consider several channels whereby labor regulations can impact innovation by increasing nonwage labor costs. In particular, the increased incentives for directed labor-saving technological change that raises capital intensity due to labor market distortions, are discussed. We also review the literature on the impact of skill biased technological change on employment and the labor share in both developed and developing countries. Evidence is provided that search costs and skill mismatch due to contractual frictions impinge on technological change and human capital accumulation. Furthermore, we elaborate the influence of labor regulations on the future of work as employers seek automation solutions or alternative work arrangements. We also explore theoretical channels and empirical evidence that the reduction in labor mobility and churning due to labor regulations inhibits technical knowledge spillovers.

Plain English Summary We show that small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) located outside the main city regions are more dependent on internal cash flow in their investments compared to SME urban city regions. Our findings clearly show that, as access to agglomerated economies decreases, financial constraints faced by the SMEs increase. The investment ability of SMEs in rural regions depends on own cash flow more but revenues in smaller regions tend to be smaller too-implying that the cash flow is likely to be lower. As a result, SMEs in smaller and more remote places would find it harder to invest and, therefore, to grow or increase productivity. The fact that such a consistent pattern of increasing investment-cash flow sensitivity is clearly observable in Sweden, one of the least regionally unequal countries, only reinforces the importance of considering the spatial dimension in policies targeted at closing SME financing gap. It is well established that there is uneven availability of credit across space, in particular for SMEs. The evidence on whether this translates into differences in actual business investments remains scarce. We assess this question by using firm-level data for Swedish firms and estimate the extent to which the average investment-cash flow sensitivities of firms vary across the urban-rural hierarchy. We find that the world of financing is not yet flat for the majority of Swedish SMEs. Companies located in non-metro regions are most dependent on own cash flow in their investments. The results hold for all firms, firms of different sizes, firms operating in low-end services, unaffiliated firms and those belonging to domestic corporations. In contrast, investment-cash flow sensitivity of firms operating in high-tech services and those belonging to a multinational enterprise does not differ geographically. On average, regional investment-cash flow sensitivity is lower in bigger, denser and more educated local labour market regions; it is higher in regions with greater concentration of SMEs.

Wage employment is the most commonly observed type of employment after a spell of entrepreneurship. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of having been an entrepreneur on earnings after individuals exit. The question is how the entrepreneurship spell influences their value in the labor market? Based on a theoretical framework and earlier literature, our specific interest lies in how these outcomes interact with education level and the nature of the entrepreneurial venture. To investigate this question, we use longitudinal register data on firms and individuals in Sweden. The empirical strategy builds on matching techniques and estimations of earnings equations in a difference-in-differences framework with heterogenous treatment years. We provide evidence that there exists an earnings penalty when highly educated entrepreneurs return to wage employment. This effect is persistent throughout the time period that we observe. For individuals with lower educational attainment, we find no or weak evidence of a wage penalty. Our results suggest that the wage penalty for highly educated individuals operates through the depreciation of specific specialized skills valuable in wage employment.

Från förordet: Årets rapport kartlägger det svenska entreprenörskapets utveckling under en turbulent tid präglad av pandemi, restriktioner och nedstängningar av hela samhällen vilket du kan läsa om i kapitel två. Trots pandemin ökar svenskt entreprenörskap under 2021 till nio procent (TEA) vilket är den högsta siffran som redovisats i GEM-projektet för Sveriges del sedan 2010. En minst sagt glädjande siffra.

Det är emellertid inte en anledning att luta sig tillbaka. Världen står inför stora utmaningar i form av komponentbrist, störningar i leveranskedjor samt en oroande geopolitisk situation, inte minst i och med Rysslands invasion av Ukraina. Därtill kan tilläggas att Sverige dras med olösta och kända problem som till exempel en dysfunktionell arbetsmarknad präglad av kompetensbrist kombinerat med hög arbetslöshet och låg självförsörjningsgrad bland stora delar av befolkningen.

I årets rapport görs även nedslag i entreprenörernas relation till miljömässig- och social hållbarhet. Svenska entreprenörer uppvisar på intet sätt det största engagemanget för bland annat miljömässig hållbarhet globalt sett. Men det finns anledning att tro att det åtminstone delvis kan bero på att företagare i Sverige ställer högre krav inom sin verksamhet, speciellt jämfört med företagare i utvecklingsländer.

In this paper, we propose a novel method for high-growth firm prediction by minimizing a cost function using a Genetic Algorithm (GA). To achieve it, the GA is used to search to find a set of important variables which provide the best fit for machine learning models so that accurate predictions can be made for high-growth firm prediction. The GA is employed to optimize the mean square error (MSE) between the accurate results and the predicted results of the machine learning methods by evolving the initially generated binary solutions through iterations. The proposed method obtains the best fitting set of variables for the machine learning methods for high-growth firm prediction. Four different machine learning methods which are Support Vector Machines (SVM), Logistic Regression, Random Forest (RF) and K-Nearest Neighbor (K-NN) have been employed with the GA and experimental results show that using RF with the GA achieves the best accuracy results with 94.93%. © 2022 IEEE.