On 18-19 October Swedish House of Finance held their 11th National PhD Workshop in Finance. The workshop offered students from Swedish academic institutions the possibility to present their research and get feedback from faculty and fellow students. It brought together PhD students and faculty in Finance from all Sweden to share and discuss their work.

At the workshop they also awarded a prize for best paper, won by IIES graduate student Markus Kondziella for his paper "Recent Changes in Firm Dynamics and the Nature of Economic Growth".

Markus documents that the Swedish economy displays similar trends that have recently been documented for the U.S. economy.

In particular, he finds that the dispersion of revenue productivity – a popular measure of efficiency frictions in the economy – and sales concentration within industries has been rising during 1997-2017. Surprisingly, the life cycle growth of firms has accelerated during the same period. He studies the trends through a dynamic framework, where firms’ market shares and markups are explained by the firms’ decisions to compete within their markets or to enter markets of their competitors. To explain the empirical trends the model points towards rising barriers to market entry, while costs of the firms to improve their own-products have been falling. In response to the fall in innovation costs the long run economic growth rate increases. To strengthen long run economic growth a subsidy on the innovation costs is a successful policy tool, while lowering the cost of market entry turns out to harm economic growth as firms have lower incentives to innovate on their products.

I am very honored to receive the award for my job market paper.

- It was a fantastic conference and I want to thank both the Swedish House of Finance for the organization and my discussant Sampreet Goraya for his excellent comments, says Markus.

The prize awarded was 30,000 SEK.