Entrepreneurship
Why Do High-Income Parents Raise More Entrepreneurs?
Abstract (updated August 2026):
I study why advantaged children are more likely to become entrepreneurs. In Finnish administrative data, those from the top 1% of the parental income distribution are more than five times as likely to own businesses and nearly three times as likely to found firms as the bottom half, with similar but weaker gradients for parental wealth. The most important channel is prior business ownership, which I organize through an "ownership ladder'' model where entrepreneurship is a later rung reached early. Liquidity does not appear to be the binding constraint, and the steep selection has first-order implications for intergenerational income mobility.
Anatomy of Startup Teams (with Samuli Knüpfer and Youssef Zad)
Gender Gaps in Entrepreneurship and Firm Performance (with Jarkko Harju and Tuomas Matikka)
Finnish Entrepreneurs in Estonia: Responses to Changes in Migration Costs and Cross-Border Taxation (with Jarkko Harju, Aino Linnunsalo and Aapo Stenhammar)
Wages and collective bargaining
Are Firms Willing to Pay Lower Wages? A Quasi-Experiment on Subminimum Wage Policy (with Petri Böckerman, Henri Keränen and Tuomas Kosonen)
Abstract (updated November 2024):
We examine a subminimum wage policy in the Finnish retail trade sector during 1993-1998 that allowed firms to pay subminimum wages to newly hired workers under the age of 25. This quasi-experiment enables us to compare wages for new hires in retail trade with those in similar industries. Despite the ongoing recession, the policy was adopted by firms sparingly, with most eligible workers being hired at the standard minimum wage. We propose that wage norm at the standard minimum wage as a potential mechanism explaining the low take-up of subminimum wage. We provide empirical evidence supporting this mechanism, most notably the excess mass at the standard minimum wage in the wage distribution of eligible workers. Many firms that paid the subminimum wage also reverted back to paying the standard minimum wages for subsequent hires.
Collectively Bargained Wage Floors and Contracted Wage Increases in European Countries (with Tuomas Kosonen, Stefano Lombardi, Antoine Bertheau, Manudeep Bhuller, Petri Böckerman, Ana Rute Cardoso, Bernardo Fanfani, Alice Kügler and Kasperi Kuuskoski)
Abstract (updated May 2026):
This paper provides a data-driven description of sectoral collective bargaining in six European countries: Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, and Portugal. We examine two key wage-setting features—wage floors and contracted wage increases—using a detailed data on collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) linked to matched employer-employee data. We document that wage floors have a large spread across industries within and across countries. Moreover, there are important cross-country differences in whether contractual wage increases are applied to raise wages above the wage floors. This implies substantial variation across countries in the potential for sectoral collective bargaining to affect wage equality and compression. We construct an adjusted bite measure to capture these differences numerically.
Measurement of inequality
Inequality in Finland: Evidence from Distributional National Accounts (with Ohto Kanninen and Terhi Ravaska)
Older working papers (inequality and economic growth):
When Aiyagari meets Piketty: Growth, Inequality and Capital Shares (with Kari Heimonen, Juha Junttila and Teemu Pekkarinen, February 2021). New version (February 2023)