Welcome! I'm a senior lecturer at the Department of Economics and Statistics, Linnaeus University, Växjö, Sweden

Email: jonas.kolsrud[at]lnu.se

I do research on consumption and saving, public social insurance programs and wage formation.

Working papers

Taxing top wealth: Migration responses and their aggregate economic implications (2024) (with K. Jakobsen, H. Kleven, C. Landais and M. Muñoz)

Revise and resubmit, American Economic Review

Do wealth taxes lead to a harmful exodus of wealthy taxpayers? Using administrative data on wealth, firm ownership structure, and migration in Sweden and Denmark, we estimate international migration responses to wealth taxation and evaluate the aggregate economic implications of tax-induced migration. Exploiting three large reforms, we find significant migration responses to wealth taxes among the wealthy. We then investigate individual-level, firm-level, and market-level effects of these migration responses. A large fraction of wealthy taxpayers are business owners, and the employment, investments, and value-added of these businesses are negatively affected by owner out-migration. Nevertheless, the aggregate consequences of these effects are modest. We estimate that migration responses to a 1pp increase in the top wealth tax rate decrease the stock of wealthy taxpayers by less than 2% in the long run, and lead to a reduction of 0.05% in aggregate employment, 0.07% in aggregate investment, and 0.13% in aggregate value-added. Hence, our results demonstrate that trickle-down effects of tax-induced migration by the wealthy do exist, but that they are quantitatively small.

Link to paper

The capital advantage: Returns to ability in the labor and capital markets (2025) (with S. Bastani, K. Karlsson and D. Waldenström)

Does cognitive ability matter more in the capital market than in the labor market? While ability-based differences in wages and capital income are well documented separately, they have rarely been examined jointly. Using Swedish registry data, we show that the return on cognitive ability in the capital market is roughly twice that in the labor market. This gap persists after controlling for education, occupation, and parental background and reflects higher savings and superior risk-adjusted investment performance. Cognitive ability is therefore a distinct driver of wealth accumulation beyond earnings, revealing an overlooked mechanism behind inequality and redistribution.

Link to paper

Work in progress

Labor shortages, rent sharing and employment dynamics

I combine linked employer-employee data with data from a firm tendency survey in Sweden to gauge the effects of firms' reports of labor shortages on wage formation and employment dynamics. Firms that report labor shortage raise incumbent workers' wages 0.3 to 0.9 percent faster. The effects are concentrated among highly educated workers earning above median wages: Workers in the top wage quartile get up to 2 percent higher wage raises compared the national average. Also, incumbent workers in firms with labor shortage climb quicker up the job ladder. The employment dynamics can be understood as firms with labor shortage being more prone to hire workers from non-employment who take jobs further down the job ladder while incumbent workers move up the rungs. Moves up the job ladder is the chief explanation as to why labor shortages lead to higher wage growth, not rent sharing.

See the NIER's Wage formation report (2022) for a shorter version in Swedish.

Labor market effects of high minimum wages: Evidence from Sweden

I study the effect of collective agreed minimum wages on employment and wage formation in the retail and hospitality sectors in Sweden. In the sectors, which traditionally employ many workers with a lower degree of labor market attachment, the minimum wage bite rose from 60% in year 2000 to 70% in 2010. This makes it an interesting case study to see how high minimum wages can become before they start having adverse effects on employment. I find that higher minimum wages increase the likelihood of non-employment among incumbent workers; minimum wages raise total wages but that the relationship is inelastic suggesting that workers earning more than the minimum wage are compensated for the minimum wage increments; labor earnings drop since higher wages cannot compensate for reduced employment on both the intensive and extensive margins. I also find that minimum wages affect employment negatively when the minimum wage bite rise but not when it is kept constant, albeit at a relatively high level.

See the NIER's Wage formation report (2021) for a shorter version in Swedish.