Bio

Joacim serves as an Associate Professor and Program Director of the Firm Competitiveness program at the Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN), and is a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Hanken School of Economics. He works on bringing Swedish registry data to the research frontier in Labor and Finance. A central question in his research is how to enhance the competitiveness of firms and the economy by ensuring the right people create, own, control, and work in the right firms. His work encompasses over 30 publications and working papers, has won multiple awards, and has been frequently featured in national and international media. It has over 1600 citations on Google Scholar and a top decile ranking for all-time downloads worldwide on SSRN. Contact him via email at joacim.tag@ifn.se, phone at +46 73 033 7977, or follow him on LinkedIn (@joacimtag) and X (@joacimtag).

Now

Right now I am working on revising JAQ of All Trades: Job Mismatch, Firm Productivity, and Managerial Quality for the Journal of Financial Economics, revising PhD Studies Hurt Mental Health, but Less Than Previously Feared for Research Policy, finalizing the conditional acceptance of What Is the Cost of Privatization for Workers? for The Journal of Finance, and undertaking a comprehensive revision of the working paper Technology Transfer in Mergers and Acquisitions and the Careers of Workers. I am also writing an article on Generative AI (which will serve as a basis for a policy seminar at IFN on April 23rd), and a report for SNS on evaluating the effects of establishing a bunch of new universities in Sweden in 1977 (to be released on April 25th). I am also visiting the Swedish House of Finance on Thursdays from Feb 1st to June 27th, and I am on the Steering Group for the Nordic Microdata Database and the IFN FAME Database, and on the Scientific Committee for the 2024 editions of the "CSEF and RCFS Conference on Labor, Finance, and Inequality" and the "CEPR Joint Workshop on Incentives, Management and Organization (IMO) & Entrepreneurship, Strategy, and Firm Dynamics (ESF)" (please submit your paper!). I will discuss a paper at the FIRS Conference in Berlin (29-31 of May). You can find all my recent working papers here, lectures here, and presentations here.

Selected Research

Coraggio, Luca, Marco Pagano, Annalisa Scognamiglio and Joacim Tåg. 2023.”JAQ of All Trades: Job Mismatch, Firm Productivity and Managerial Quality” IFN Working Paper No. 1427, April. https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4069721. Revise and resubmit at Journal of Financial Economics.

• We present a novel measure of job-worker allocation quality (JAQ) by exploiting employer-employee data with machine learning techniques and validate it in various ways. Our measure correlates positively with earnings and negatively with separations over individual workers’ careers. At firm level, it increases with competition, non-family firm status, workers’ human capital and has a robust correlation with productivity. The quality of rank-and-file workers’ job matches responds positively to improvements in management quality. JAQ can be constructed for any employer-employee data including workers’ occupations, and used to explore research questions in organization and labor economics, as well as in corporate finance.
• Presentations: AFA, Bank of Italy, EFA, EEA-ESEM, WFA, Brucchi Luchino Workshop, ES Winter Meetings, the Labor and Finance Online Seminar, the Bristol-Exeter-Lancaster seminar, Ca’ Foscari, CSEF, EIEF, Hanken, Helsinki GSE, IFN, Swedish Conference in Economics, Ratio, UNC, and Örebro University.

Keloharju, Matti, Samuli Knüpfer, Dagmar Müller, and Joacim Tåg. 2023. “PhD Studies Hurt Mental Health, but Less Than Previously Feared” IFN Working Paper No. 1435, September. https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4190289. Revise and Resubmit at Research Policy.

• We study the mental health of PhD students in Sweden using comprehensive administrative data on prescriptions, specialist care visits, hospitalizations, and causes of death. We find about 7% (5%) of PhD students receive medication or diagnosis for depression (anxiety) in a given year. These prevalence rates are less than one-third of the earlier reported survey-based estimates, and even after adjusting for difference in methodology, 43% (72%) of the rates in the literature. Nevertheless, PhD students still fare worse than their peers not pursuing graduate studies. Our difference-in-differences research design can attribute at least 80% of this health disadvantage to the time in the PhD program. This deterioration suggests doctoral studies causally affect mental health.

Olsson, Martin, and Joacim Tåg. 2023.”What Is the Cost of Privatization for Workers?” IFN Working Paper No. 1201, September. https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3134462. Conditionally accepted at The Journal of Finance.

• The privatization of state-owned enterprises is on the agenda of policymakers across the globe. Using rich administrative data on firms and workers covering two decades, we study how privatization affects the careers and welfare of workers. Consistent with the effects of an initial reorganization of the workforce, wage income declines and unemployment increases. These effects are stronger for workers protected by state ownership. We do not find negative spillovers on family and health outcomes. We also demonstrate that privatization encourages workers to enter entrepreneurship. The firm-level productivity gains from privatization are approximately five times larger than the incumbent worker-level costs due to lost wage income.
• Presentations: AASLE, AFA, ANU, AEA, EALE, EFA, EEA, IFN, IFN Stockholm Conference and the Southwestern University of Finance and Economics.

Keloharju, M., S. Knüpfer, and J. Tåg. 2023. “CEO Health” The Leadership Quarterly 34(3):101672.

• Using comprehensive data on 28 cohorts in Sweden, we analyze CEO health and its determinants and outcomes. We find CEOs are in much better health than the population and on par with other high-skill professionals. These results apply in particular to mental health and to CEOs of larger companies. We explore three mechanisms that can account for CEOs’ robust health. First, we find health predicts appointment to a CEO position. Second, the CEO position has no discernible impact on the health of its holder. Third, poor health is associated with greater CEO turnover. Poor CEO health also predicts poor firm outcomes: we find a statistically significant association between mental health and corporate performance for smaller-firm CEOs.
• Media coverage: Arbetarskydd, fPlus, VD Tidningen, Tidningen Chef, Vaasa Insider.
• Presentations: Aalto, AFA, Bologna, BI, EFA, FEIBS, Hannover, HU-Berlin, IFN, JIBS, KI, LFG Workshop at Booth, LU, Memphis, SSE House of Innovation, Southampton, and TSE.

Colonnelli, E., J. Tåg, M. Webb, and S. Wolter. 2018. “A Cross-Country Comparison of Dynamics in the Large Firm Wage Premium.” AEA Papers and Proceedings 108 (May): 323–27.

• We provide stylized facts on the existence and dynamics over time of the large firm wage premium for Brazil, Germany, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. The large firm premium exists in all these countries. However, we uncover substantial differences among them in the evolution of the wage premium over time and no evidence of common cross-country industry trends.
• Presentations: ASSA, IFN.

Olsson, M. and J. Tåg. 2017. “Private Equity, Layoffs, and Job Polarization.” Journal of Labor Economics 35: 697–754.

• We argue that ownership change is one driver of job polarization by showing that private equity buyouts of low productive firms are coupled with productivity enhancing investments in automation and offshoring. As a result, workers performing routine or offshorable job tasks in these firms tend to get laid off.
• Media coverage: Affärsvärlden, Dagens Industri, Dagens Nyheter, Sveriges Radio, Svenska Dagbladet.
• Presentations: EEA, EFA, EIEF, IFN, KTH, NHH, LU, Ratio, SHOF, KU, GU, and Illinois.