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We exploit a quasi-experiment to provide new evidence on the magnitude of the housing wealth effect. We estimate an immediate shock of approximately -15% to house prices close to one of Stockholm's airports after its operations were unexpectedly continued. This source of price variation is ideal for identifying housing wealth effects since it is unrelated to macroeconomic conditions. We estimate a micro elasticity of 0.45 among purchasers of new cars. The implied aggregate MPC on cars is however only 0.13 cents per dollar. The response is entirely concentrated to homeowners with a loan-to-value ratio between 0.6 and 0.8.
Professors Albert N. Link and Donald S. Siegel are the joint recipients of the 2026 Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research. Over several decades, their scholarship has fundamentally reshaped our understanding of how technology transfer, public policy, and institutional design influence entrepreneurial activity. Drawing on rigorous economic theory and quantitative methods, often combined with insights from management and public administration, they have established technology transfer as a core domain within entrepreneurship research. Their work demonstrates how universities, public research organizations, and government programs—most notably those shaped by the Bayh–Dole Act and the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program—affect entrepreneurial entry, innovation, and growth. By shifting attention beyond the individual entrepreneur and firm to the surrounding institutional and policy environment, Link and Siegel broadened the analytical scope of the field and provided a foundation for evidence-based entrepreneurship policy. In parallel, their leadership in building scholarly communities, journals, and research networks has been instrumental in consolidating technology transfer and public sector entrepreneurship as vibrant research areas. Collectively, their contributions have advanced theory, informed policy design, and influenced practice, thereby leaving a lasting imprint on entrepreneurship research and its societal relevance. Professors Albert N. Link and Donald S. Siegel are the joint recipients of the 2026 Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research. They are awarded the prize for their research on innovative entrepreneurship, and how new firm formation and growth depend upon and draw strength from local flows of knowledge and technology. In their research, they have particularly explained how universities, public research organizations, and government programs can contribute to innovative entrepreneurship, and in important ways promoted the development of government policies aimed at enhanced entrepreneurial activity. Their research has opened up new perspectives and scholarly conversations in the field of entrepreneurship research, centered around the societal embeddedness and relevance of entrepreneurship.
Low barriers to trade and access to international capital markets have long been argued to improve economic conditions in a country. However, there is less consensus on the impact of economic globalization on the distribution of those gains across society. There are several possible explanations for the conflicting findings in the existing literature, perhaps most notably endogeneity issues that plague the cross-country studies. To alleviate this, we utilize matching methods. Instead of using Gini coefficients, as much of the previous literature, we examine large increases in economic globalization’s impact on 5-year income growth in each quintile of the income distribution as well as top 1 and 5 percent. We find no evidence that income growth for the middle classes in OECD countries is hurt by economic globalization; if anything, some results indicate statistically positive effects. Most estimates, however, are positive but statistically and economically insignificant.
Entrepreneurs often must decide how much to invest in bringing an invention to market when neither the odds of commercialization success nor the risk of displacement by later innovations are known with certainty. To analyze this setting, we extend the Aghion–Howitt model of creative destruction by introducing an explicit entrepreneurial commercialization stage and allowing key probabilities to be ambiguous, in the sense that decision-makers cannot assign a unique probability distribution over a fixed and understood set of contingencies. In equilibrium, ambiguity shortens perceived rent horizons, curbs commercialization effort and research, and thereby reduces growth by lowering the rate at which research attempts are converted into frontier-raising innovations. We also extend the framework to heterogeneous entrepreneurs who evaluate the same ambiguous prospects differently, with free entry and selection among entrants. Allowing many entrepreneurs to try in parallel improves selection and raises the expected value of successful innovation relative to centralized winner-picking, which strengthens research incentives. Relative to the Aghion–Howitt framework, policy implications change: commercialization-oriented instruments (milestone-based support, downside protection, faster intellectual property and regulatory processes, and institutions for decentralized experimentation) can dominate uniform R D wage subsidies, especially when ambiguity is high. Overall, the analysis shows that once commercialization is an endogenous entrepreneurial choice under ambiguity, the case for commercialization- and experimentation-oriented policy instruments strengthens in a Schumpeterian growth framework. When entrepreneurs cannot gauge whether an invention will pay off before rivals overtake it, many promising ideas never reach the market, and growth suffers. This paper extends a classic model of growth through creative destruction by separating the creation of new ideas from the costly and uncertain step of turning them into products that can be produced and sold. When the chances of success are hard to pin down, entrepreneurs invest less in commercialization and researchers invest less in generating new ideas, slowing long-run growth. Thus, the principal implication for policy is to complement broad R D support with instruments that reduce the cost and delay of commercialization, notably milestone-based funding, limited downside protection, and faster, more predictable regulatory and intellectual property processes.
This paper provides a game-theoretic foundation for James Buchanan’s concept of “relatively absolute absolutes”. This paradoxical notion captures Buchanan’s effort to reconcile two seemingly incompatible imperatives: constitutional rules must function as binding constraints in ordinary politics while remaining subject to peaceful revision through unanimous consent. We model this tension through a game where citizens choose between a neutral lottery mechanism and costly conflict to resolve disputes. The analysis reveals conditions under which self-interested agents will voluntarily adopt and respect procedural rules without invoking moral authority. Once established, the lottery deters unilateral defection because any violation triggers the costly conflict all parties seek to avoid, while unanimity remains an admissible path to peaceful revision when every citizen strictly gains from reopening the constitutional vote. The model thus shows how legitimate political order can be adopted and sustained from strategic considerations alone: rules are “absolute” in ordinary politics because breach is privately costly, but “relative” in principle because unanimous revision remains possible. This provides microfoundations for Buchanan’s constitutional contractarianism without invoking moral truth.
