I will be traveling the coming weeks. So instead of doing the analysis needed for a real post, let me write a little about myself, and put up articles I have already written.
I was born in Tehran in 1980. My parents are from the Kurdish town of Sanandaj. At age 9 my younger brother, my mother and I moved to Sweden. Since my mother was ill, after a few years of living in camp we received asylum for humanitarian reasons (about 30% of asylums are given for humanitarian reasons in Sweden, which means the person did not have a real case for asylum, but gets to stay in Sweden anyway because the Swedes feel sorry for them).
From the time we moved to Sweden until I started college and started getting student loans, we lived on welfare. While very grateful to the Swedish people, this experience convinced me that the their system was way too generous and not properly designed to give immigrants incentive to work, integrate and acquire the Sweden-specific human capital that is needed to succeed.
I attended to the Stockholm School of Economics, followed by the University of Chicago. I am currently a third year student at the Harris School of Public Policy. I expect to be done next year, and hope for a job in academia or in a think tank, preferably in California, D.C, or somewhere warm in the South. I will be happy with any job where I get to do research.
I am affiliated with IFN, a Swedish research institute, and with Captus, a small think tank my brother started.
Politically I am fiscally conservative, but socially libertarian. I thus agree with the Democrats on issues such as gay marriage and teaching evolution in schools, and with conservative Republicans on economic policy. Since the modern western democracies have few infringements on private liberty but lots of infringements on economic liberty, I weight the second more heavily.
In Sweden I vote for the Center-right Moderate party, especially under Fredrik Reinfeldt and finance minister and capable economist Anders Borg. My philosophy is that political ideology has to be adapted to the culture and institutions of the particular country. In other words, it has to be compatible with their national ethos.
Anglo-Saxon classical liberalism, which I personally enjoy, is not suited to the Swedish ethos. Unlike Americans, Swedes are not very independence minded, but instead are very inequality averse. A center-right program for Sweden has to be based on Scandinavian values and preferences.
Furthermore, because they still have stronger work ethics and a very homogeneous and productive population, policies such as generous replacement rates in unemployment insurance and high effective minimum wages are less destructive in Sweden than they would be in the U.S. (Needless to say as norms are eroded and as more of the population are non-Scandinavians, the associated problems are likely to increase.)
I thus oppose American economic policies in Sweden as much as I oppose Swedish policies in the U.S (and for many of the same reasons). Sweden should focus on cutting taxes to average European - not American - levels and fixing immigration.
The thinker who have made the strongest impression on me is Milton Friedman (not hard to guess...). Second is Samuel Huntington.
My favorite non-Chicago Economist is currently Raj Chetty, who is transforming public finance. Bryan Caplan has done the most interesting novel work in political science. My favorite Swedish economist is of course Magnus Henrekson.
Here are the list of the papers I have written, often with others, ordered by self-perceived quality. Notice that they can be read in place of blog posts!
Work in English:
1. "A Cross Country Measure of High-Impact Entrepreneurship"
My doctoral thesis. Not online.
2. "Reversion to the Racial Mean and Mortgage Discrimination"
This paper shows that using current year income can lead to somewhat wrong results when trying to capture race and ethnic differences, because of measurement error in income and a process called reversion to the mean. Results of standard discrimination equations can therefore be wrong (although in practice the difference may be only moderately sized).
3. "Taxation and the Quality and Quantity of Entrepreneurial Firms"
This paper shows that marginal taxes can effect entrepreneurship in a unexpected way. By reducing the option value of really good ideas, high taxes can lead to more mediocre quality entrepreneurship, increasing the number but reducing the average quality of entrepreneurs.
4. "Entrepreneurship and the Theory of Taxation"
To analyze taxes we must first understand the process being taxes. Here we argue that Entrepreneurship is different from passive investment in large, public firms and therefore effected differently by taxes. This paper is forthcoming in Small Business Economics.
5. "Fiscal Illusion and Fiscal Obfuscation: An Empirical Study of Tax Perception in Sweden"
We show that the Swedish public systematically underestimates the tax burden, and also is generally misled about the incidence of payroll taxes.
6. "The Interaction of Entrepreneurship and Institutions"
William Baumol showed that institutions can determine the type of entrepreneurship, if it is mostly productive or destructive. We extent the analysis to the opposite relation, the impact institutional/political entrepreneurs have on the rules of society.
7. Book review William Baumol: "The Microtheory of Innovative Entrepreneurship". Forthcoming in the Journal Of Economic Literature.
Work in Swedish. The last 3 are published in Swedish economics journal "Ekonomisk Debatt."
8. "Ägarbeskattningen och företagandet : om skatteteorin och den svenska policydiskussionen"
Book about dividend taxes and taxes on entrepreneurs.
9. "New perspectives on property taxation"
Argue that savings in home equity to a large extent follows behavioral savings models, in which case taxes on home equity may be more distortive than otherwise. Some discussions on the role of social norms for savings and taxation.
10. "Wrong to dissuade private equity buildup in private housing"
Same as above, the tax system should not promote borrowing and low solidity. Equity finance reduces the instability of an economy, whereas large loans and low solidity create volatility. Yet the tax system rewards the later and punished the former.
11. "Flat tax: More efficient taxation could end up costly"
The tax system should be analyzed in a general equilibrium setting, taking into account the effects on the political system. If flat taxes make it easier to expand wasteful spending, we are actually better off with a less efficient tax system (from a pure economic point of view).
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