Growth Analysis

ABSTRACT This paper evaluates the impact of Sweden’s R&D payroll tax subsidy on the employment of highly skilled workers, focusing on PhDs and STEM professionals. Unlike traditional R&D tax incentives, which reduce taxable income, this subsidy directly lowers payroll taxes for R&D personnel, making it particularly relevant for SMEs and financially constrained firms. Using firm-level panel data from 2011 to 2019 and a difference-in-differences (DiD) approach, we find that the subsidy significantly increases the employment of high-skilled workers. The effects are consistent across firm characteristics, though some variation exists between smaller and larger firms. To ensure robustness, we conduct additional tests using alternative outcome measures, firms near the subsidy cap, and a linear estimation model. A parallel trends sensitivity analysis further supports the validity of our identification strategy. Our findings contribute to the literature on R&D tax incentives and innovation policy by providing new evidence on the labour market effects of payroll tax subsidies for R&D personnel. These insights are particularly relevant for policymakers designing tax-based R&D support schemes.

This study examines the evolving role of parliamentary committees in legislative decision-making and their relationships with external actors when amending bills. Drawing on resource dependence theory and informational perspectives on parliamentary committees, we analyse the impact of information provided by business interest organizations, public interest groups, and experts in the German Bundestag’s public hearings in 2004, 2007, and 2011. Using a text-reuse approach to capture legislative amendments, we assess the influence of different information types in explaining such changes. Our results show that the Bundestag often amends government proposals, and that interest groups’ positions and experts’ evidence must be considered when explaining such amendments. We demonstrate that parliament is more responsive to business pressure than to public interest groups, which are heavily dependent on political allies in governing parties. Finally, we show that expert advice can inform policy-makers and legitimize government bills, but can also disempower public interest groups.

This article explores research programs that address societal challenges. In recent years, the rationale for innovation policy has been extended to include support instruments more explicitly designed to address societal challenges. While there are broad agreements that in this rationale research and innovation support can not only stimulate growth and economic activity, but it can also actively be directed towards meeting societal challenges. However, exploring how societal challenge policy goals can be translated into something that the support instruments can influence, are not yet the focus of challenge-driven innovation policy and a topic that seems to be neglected in the research literature. This article develops a framework for a cross country analysis of how policy, programs, and impact align and highlight what can be learned from selected societal challenge programs.

Abstract As in other countries, urbanization and industrialization in Sweden was two sides of the same coin. To a large extent, the Swedish urbanization took place at a low level with the emergence of many small towns. In the last decades, a redistribution of the urban population to bigger cities has happened. This neo‐urbanization is interpreted as a consequence of the breakthrough of the knowledge economy. This paper focuses on the ‘backside of the coin’ of this neo‐urbanization, namely, how the rural areas have been affected. Westlund found that the countryside's population growth 1990–1997 primarily could be explained by income and the size of the local labour market. In this paper, we examine the current trends of population development in different age groups and extend the possible explanatory variables to among others, some variables measuring local social capital. Our main result is that it does not seem to be rural amenities per se that explain rural population growth in certain areas, but the rural areas' relative accessibility to urban amenities. This rural dependency on urban services and goods is a major challenge for rural policy in the neo‐urban knowledge economy.

Improved decision support is deemed essential for the planning and implementation of sustainable transport solutions, but limited evidence exists that decision-relevant information is effectively used for these purposes. This paper applies a framework inspired by research in “knowledge utilization” to examine to what extent various kinds of decision support are used and have become influential in three different planning situations—a local cycle plan in Copenhagen, the Stockholm congestion charging trial and the UK national transport strategy. The results reveal the extensive use of decision support but also the difficulty of unpicking its exact role in each case. Stockholm presented the most successful case, with a mix of academic and experience-based knowledge inputs facilitating understanding and acceptance. The cycle plan example revealed very limited influence of cycling design guidance. The UK national transport strategy fell somewhere in between with evidence of assessment and monitoring of the plans being well bedded in the culture of the organizations involved, but less supportive of sustainability objectives. While decision support and monitoring are clearly relevant, they provide no guarantee for the implementation of sustainable transport solutions.