Erik Lakomaa

In an important and much cited study, Pettersson-Lidbom (2008) identifies significant left-wing majority coalition effects on economic outcomes for Swedish local governments, 1974-1994. We first replicate the original study and then extend the original research by applying Pettersson-Lidbom's empirical model using new and more detailed coalition data, compiled from registry books and register data recently made available from Statistics Sweden. The data allows us to test for left party policy outcomes including previously undefined coalitions, such as left minority coalitions and coalitions with local or emerging parties. We find that Pettersson-Lidbom's previous results hold and are even strengthened using the new data and some alternative specifications, but the results are heavily dependent on the definition of left-wing rule. When including left wing minority coalitions and left-wing coalitions including the Green Party, previous significant differences between the left and right are no longer discernable.

While numerous studies examine the effects of school competition on student performance, little research directly addresses a key critique of competition: its potential to negatively affect parental engagement and voice. We draw on Hirschman's theory of voice to argue that voucher-based school competition increases opportunities for exit but may crowd out voice. To assess the causal effects of competition on parental voice, we employ a robust two-way fixed effects difference-in-differences framework, comparing municipalities in Sweden that introduced competition with those that did not. Our findings indicate that school complaints decline following the introduction of competition. This decrease in voice is driven by neither a decrease in problems in school nor by changes in teaching staff quality or attrition. This suggests that the decrease in complaints is driven not by an increase in school quality but rather by a change in how much parents voice their concerns. These results offer new insights into the unintended consequences of school competition reforms, highlighting how marketbased policies may shape school quality beyond their intended effects.

Recent advances in large-scale digitisation have created new opportunities for economic and business historians who work with substantial bodies of qualitative archival material. Although historical datasets of around 10,000 to 100,000 observations are modest compared to conventional big data, they present similar information processing challenges and make it possible to apply a wide range of machine learning techniques. In this paper, we show how relational databases can provide the necessary infrastructure for preparing, structuring, and analysing large qualitative historical datasets, and how they support the effective use of machine learning tools, including Large Language Models (LLMs). We draw on a research program that has collected more than 114,000 digitised documents from over 30 archives. Our relational database design enables us to structure unstructured sources, standardise metadata, link documents to events and actors, and create longitudinal datasets that can be used for supervised learning, topic modelling, document classification, and embedding-based similarity searches. We also assess the value and limitations of LLMs in historical research. LLMs can accelerate tasks such as document triage, entity recognition, thematic grouping, and preliminary coding. At the same time, they introduce risks related to hallucinations, opaque reasoning processes, and difficulties in tracing the evidentiary basis of outputs. We argue that relational databases reduce these risks by retaining document-level traceability, by making the full set of consulted sources transparent, and by allowing researchers to verify and reinterpret AI-assisted results by saving the epistemological chain of tentative AI suggestions and subsequent researcher validation. Our contribution is an empirically grounded demonstration of how qualitative big data, relational databases, and machine learning methods can be combined to advance economic history, along with a discussion of the safeguards needed to ensure these tools are used responsibly.

Regeringen har nu överlämnat sitt förslag till ändringar i vapenlagen till Lagrådet som har att granska det över julledigheten. Förslaget beskrivs av regeringen som innebära lättnader för jägare och sportskyttar. En närmare genomgång visar dock att de föreslagna ändringarna sammantaget innebär en påtaglig skärpning av restriktiviteten i vapenregleringen. Därutöver innehåller förslaget flera bestämmelser som – oavsett graden av restriktivitet – är olämpligt utformade ur ett rättssäkerhetsperspektiv.

Achieving and maintaining a monopolist position is often assumed to be among the objectives of a firm. However, there are instances where it is better to operate in a competitive market than remain a monopolist. Monopolistic firms may, therefore, push for deregulation - at least on their terms. We introduce the concept of monopolists for competition to analyse two such companies, Swedish telecom operator Televerket and the Stockholm Stock Exchange (SSE). Thus, the paper contributes to the literature on incumbent action and corporate political activity (CPA) by state-owned/state-controlled companies, a field that has received little interest in business history research. We find that the personal political skills of the companies' managers played a crucial role in the deregulatory process, as institutional obstacles prevented them from using many standard CPA tools. Fear of being perceived as monopolistic also restricted them from leveraging their market positions when controlling the evolving market structures.

Regeringen föreslog tidigare i år att jägare som innehade vissa halvautomatiska jaktvapen skulle få licenserna för dessa indragna och vapnen skulle tvångsinlösas. Samtidigt skulle nya licenser för sådana för jakt stoppas genom en ändring i vapenförordningen: denna beslutades i juli med verkan från augusti. I debatten har dessa vapen ofta kallats ”AR-15” men definitionen som infördes i vapenförordningen omfattar långt fler modeller; i praktiken de flesta på marknaden förekommande. I klass 2 (dvs. jaktgevär som används för rådjursjakt) omfattas exempelvis samtliga modeller av halvautomatiska gevär som saluförs i Sverige utom två.

Despite minimal formal barriers to entry, the Swedish food retail sector has remained highly concentrated for over seven decades. Since the 1950s, two dominant actors, the privately held ICA Group and the cooperative KF, have continuously controlled approximately 75 percent of the market and the big three over 90 %. This paper draws on extensive archival material from corporate and government sources to explore how this duopoly was maintained. It argues that ICA and KF employed a range of non-market strategies to preserve the existing market structure, including political lobbying, collusion with policymakers, preferential access to store locations, and influence over competition policy. These strategies exemplify a corporatist mode of regulation that helped insulate the sector from liberalizing pressures and structural change.

Research on market shaping has highlighted how firms actively transform their operating environments, yet most studies emphasize individual focal actors and contemporary contexts. This paper advances understanding of collaborative market shaping by theorizing the role of organizational hybridity and legitimizing boundary work as core mechanisms that enable collective strategies to emerge and diffuse across markets. We argue that organizational hybridity allows firms to balance autonomy with coordination, while legitimizing boundary work reframes collusive features as legitimate cooperation. Empirically, we analyze voluntary retail chains (VRCs) in Sweden between 1945 and 1975, drawing on nearly 2,700 archival documents and 38,000 pages of trade journals. We show how VRCs coordinated procurement, branding, and access to retail space, thereby reshaping the regulatory and competitive contours of multiple markets. Our findings expand the empirical and methodological base of market shaping research and highlight the value of historical analysis for understanding how firms navigate Knightian uncertainty.