Before and during the early part of my PhD I worked as a research assistant at the Ratio Institute, the Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN) and the Swedish Institute for Social Research (SOFI).
Being the data-nerd that I am, I kept an archive of everything I contributed to. Any work that thanked me for research assistance or comments is saved in a folder once it’s out as a report, working paper, book or peer-reviewed article. My archive holds roughly 50 projects I worked on across the three institutes. The 20 below are the ones where I am explicitly thanked. In the other works, I had a more minor part or it was a governmental report without any acknowledgements section.
Summary statistics
Of the 20 works, 13 thank me for research assistance and 7 thank me for comments on the manuscript. Seventeen came out of my time at IFN, two from Ratio and one from SOFI.
The ten journal articles appeared in ten different outlets: the Journal of Finance, the Journal of International Economics, the Journal of Industrial Economics, Energy Economics, Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, the Journal of Evolutionary Economics, the Journal of Institutional Economics, the North American Journal of Economics and Finance, IZA World of Labor, and Ekonomisk Debatt.
The years above are publication years, not the years I did the work. The assistance took place between 2016 and 2021. The 2019 spike is the three books plus two early IFN drafts. There’s a long tail leading into 2025 and 2026 reflecting the journal review process.
My favorite part about being an RA is the breadth of fields that I had the opportunity to assist in. As an RA, I worked on Swedish register data, electricity market institutions, patent data and much more. The literature review on segregation was the starting point for my academic interest on the topic.
One way to illustrate the breadths of topics covered is to illustrate the JEL codes in the published works. Nine of the twenty works declare JEL codes (the books and the Swedish-language pieces do not) and between them those nine touch 14 of the 18 top-level JEL categories. Only general economics, history of thought, macroeconomics and economic systems are missing. Labor (J) and industrial organization (L) are the densest, which reflects the emphasis on applied microeconomics at the institutes where I was an RA.
My RA network
Acknowledgements name assistants in groups, so the archive also records who I was working with. Twelve other people are named alongside me across the twenty works.
Alexandra Allard shows up in five of them, Hedda Nielsen in three and Glenn Nielsen in two. These are my friends and colleagues at IFN. The clusters off to the sides are project teams that formed once and never again: the three of us on the Journal of Finance paper, the four on the foreign-acquisitions project. I thoroughly enjoyed working with them all!
The researchers I worked for
In the projects that lead to a published work, who were the researchers leading these projects? Below is a co-authorship network for the published works that I was involved in. I’ve divided them up into three types of works, those where I’m (1) thanked for assistance, (2) thanked for comments, or (3) not thanked because my contribution was very minor or did not make it into the final product. This last category is not a rude omission of thanks, but if an RA just helped make a plot a bit nicer it does not require a full acknowledgement in the paper but rather a nice ‘thank you’ e-mail and a conversation around the coffee machine.
The network below has one node per researcher, sized by how many of their projects I was involved in and linked where two of them wrote together. Sometimes I know everyone of the co-authors, sometimes I know only one of them. I am not in this network at all, everyone here is here because I worked for them at some point.
Select a researcher to list the projects of theirs I worked on.
Sixty-five researchers, forty-one projects. Magnus Henrekson tops the list at seven, then Lars Persson at five, and Therese Nilsson, Pehr-Johan Norbäck, Niklas Elert and Fredrik Heyman at four each.
From working paper to journal
Several of the projects I assisted on were working papers when I left them. Four of them have since appeared in peer-reviewed journals. Below is an overview of the pipeline from working paper to publication.
| Working paper | Published as | Gap |
|---|---|---|
| IFN WP 1357 (2020) — Economic Freedom and Antisemitism | Journal of Institutional Economics (2021) | 1 year |
| Draft (2019) — Taxation of Swedish Owner-Entrepreneurs, 1862 to 2018 | Journal of Evolutionary Economics (2023) | 4 years |
| IFN WP 1453 (2022) — How International Experience Helps Shape Labor Market Outcomes | Journal of International Economics (2026), retitled From Local to Global | 4 years |
| IFN WP 1201 (2018) — What Is the Cost of Privatization for Workers? | Journal of Finance (2025) | 7 years |
A median of four years from working paper to print, and seven for the one that landed in the Journal of Finance. Six of the works below are still unpublished working papers.
Bibliography
Entries are grouped by output type and ordered by year, most recent first.
Journal articles
Davidson, C., Heyman, F., Matusz, S., Sjöholm, F. & Zhu, S. C. (2026). From Local to Global: How Foreign Acquisitions Reshape Job Mobility. Journal of International Economics, 162, 104278. DOI · earlier version: IFN Working Paper No. 1453 (2022)
Olsson, M. & Tåg, J. (2025). What Is the Cost of Privatization for Workers? The Journal of Finance, 80(4), 2107–2151. DOI · earlier version: IFN Working Paper No. 1201 (2018)
Deerfield, A. & Elert, N. (2023). Entrepreneurship and Regulatory Voids: The Case of Ridesharing. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 47(5), 1568–1593. DOI
Elert, N., Johansson, D., Stenkula, M. & Wykman, N. (2023). The Evolution of Owner-Entrepreneurs’ Taxation: Five Tax Regimes over a 160-Year Period. Journal of Evolutionary Economics, 33, 517–540. DOI · earlier draft (2019): Taxation of Swedish Owner-Entrepreneurs, 1862 to 2018
Lundin, E. (2022). Geographic Price Granularity and Investments in Wind Power: Evidence from a Swedish Electricity Market Splitting Reform. Energy Economics, 113, 106208. DOI
Persson, L. & Seiler, T. (2022). Entrepreneurial Optimism and Creative Destruction. North American Journal of Economics and Finance, 62, 101737. DOI
Berggren, N. & Nilsson, T. (2021). Economic Freedom and Antisemitism. Journal of Institutional Economics, 17(2), 289–304. DOI · earlier version: IFN Working Paper No. 1357 (2020)
Lundin, E. (2021). Market Power and Joint Ownership: Evidence from Nuclear Plants in Sweden. The Journal of Industrial Economics, 69(3), 485–536. DOI
Henrekson, M. (2020). How Labor Market Institutions Affect Job Creation and Productivity Growth. IZA World of Labor, article 38 (updated version). DOI
Lundin, E. (2019). Effekter av privatiseringar på pris och arbetskostnad i den svenska eldistributionssektorn. Ekonomisk Debatt, 47(7), 40–49.
Books
Elert, N., Henrekson, M. & Sanders, M. (2019). The Entrepreneurial Society: A Reform Strategy for the European Union. International Studies in Entrepreneurship, vol. 98. Berlin: Springer. DOI
Henrekson, M. (ed.) (2019). IFN 1939–2019: 80 år av ekonomisk forskning. Stockholm: Ekerlids Förlag. ISBN 978-91-88849-45-8
Carlson, B. & Lundahl, M. (2019). Ett forskningsinstitut expanderar: IUI från 1950 till 1966. Stockholm: Ekerlids Förlag. ISBN 978-91-88849-44-1
Working papers and reports
Altmejd, A. (2026). Inheritance of Fields of Study. CESifo Working Paper No. 11113 (original version May 2024; this version March 2026). Link
Korpi, M., Halvarsson, D., Öner, Ö., Clark, W. A. V., Mihaescu, O., Östh, J. & Bäckman, O. (2022). Native Population Turnover & Emerging Segregation: The Role of Amenities, Crime and Housing. Ratio Working Paper No. 358. Link
Horn, H. (2020). International Jurisdiction over Standard-Essential Patents. IFN Working Paper No. 1314 (also CEPR Discussion Paper 14297 and EUI RSCAS Working Paper 2023/19). Link
Svensson, R. (2020). The Scientific Output of a Database on Commercialized Patents. IFN Working Paper No. 1349. Link
Koptyug, N. & Zhou, W. (2019). Left-Digit Bias and Product Characteristics: Evidence from Used Car Auctions. IFN working paper (draft).
Andersson-Widenfelt, I., Koptyug, N. & Winter, A. (2019). In-group Bias and (Un)Ethical Investment: Evidence from Professional Investors. IFN working paper (draft).
Karlson, N. & Knudsen, I. (2017). Kostnader och konsekvenser av en arbetsmarknadskonflikt: En fallstudie av byggstrejken våren 2016. Ratio, rapportserie del II. Link