Bio

Joacim Tåg is Senior Research Fellow and Program Director at the Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN) in Stockholm, and Distinguished Visiting Professor at Hanken School of Economics in Helsinki. His research combines Swedish population-wide registry data with questions in corporate finance and labor economics, focusing on how corporate ownership, corporate governance, and talent allocation shape firm performance and competitiveness. He has authored more than 35 articles and working papers, published in journals such as The Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, and Journal of Labor Economics. His work has received several awards, accumulated over 2,000 citations, and been featured in The Economist and other international and national outlets. Beyond academia, he engages with policymakers and industry on issues including private equity, entrepreneurship, labor markets, and the economic impact of artificial intelligence, and has lectured on corporate finance, entrepreneurship, labor economics, and empirical methods at Hanken School of Economics, Stockholm School of Economics, and Lund University. Contact him via email at joacim.tag@ifn.se, phone at +46 73 033 7977, or follow him on LinkedIn (@joacimtag).

Now

Right now I am working on working on two new papers related to firms, human capital, and startups. I am also revising the working paper Tolerating Losses for Growth: J-Curves in Venture Capital Investing for the Review of Finance and doing a comprehensive revision of the working paper Mergers and Acquisitions, Human Capital Reallocation, and the Costs of Technological Change. Additionally, I am teaching a PhD course in Labor and Finance at Hanken in November 2025, and I am on the Steering Group for the Nordic Microdata Database and the IFN FAME Database. You can find PDFs of all my recent articles here, working papers here, lectures here, and presentations here.

Selected Research

Olsson, Martin, and Joacim Tåg. 2025.”What Is the Cost of Privatization for Workers?” The Journal of Finance 80(4): 2107-2151 https://doi.org/10.1111/jofi.13462.

• Privatization of state-owned enterprises is on the agenda across the globe. Using Swedish data covering two decades, we show that productivity gains and headcount reductions are associated with economic costs for incumbent workers. Workers experience income losses and higher unemployment, but half of the losses are covered by the social safety net. We also find small positive effects on entrepreneurship and cash holdings but no meaningful effects on other labor market, family, health, or household finance outcomes. Productivity improves when the CEO is replaced, and the gains outweigh workers' income declines by a factor of between two and six.

Coraggio, Luca, Marco Pagano, Annalisa Scognamiglio and Joacim Tåg. 2025.”JAQ of All Trades: Job Mismatch, Firm Productivity and Managerial Quality” Journal of Financial Economics 164: 103992. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jfineco.2024.103992.

• We develop a novel measure of job-worker allocation quality (JAQ) by exploiting employer-employee data with machine learning techniques. Based on our measure, the quality of job-worker matching correlates positively with individual labor earnings and firm productivity, as well as with market competition, non-family firm status and employees’ human capital. Management turns out to play a key role in job-worker matching: when existing managers are replaced by better ones, the quality of rank-and-file workers' job matches improves. JAQ can be constructed for any employer-employee data including workers' occupations, and used to explore research questions in corporate finance and organization economics.

Keloharju, Matti, Samuli Knüpfer, Dagmar Müller, and Joacim Tåg. 2024. “PhD Studies Hurt Mental Health, but Less Than Previously Feared.” Research Policy 53(8):105078. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2024.105078

• 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 that 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 attributes all of this health disadvantage to the time in the PhD program. This deterioration suggests doctoral studies causally affect mental health.

Keloharju, Matti, Samuli Knüpfer, and Joacim Tåg. 2023. “CEO Health.” The Leadership Quarterly 34(3): 101672. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2022.101672.

• 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.

Olsson, Martin, and Joacim Tåg. 2017. “Private Equity, Layoffs, and Job Polarization.” Journal of Labor Economics 35 (3): 697–754. https://doi.org/10.1086/690712.

• Private equity firms are often criticized for laying off workers, but the evidence on who loses their jobs and why is scarce. 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.

Selected Policy

1. Martin Olsson and Joacim Tåg. 2025. "Hur påverkas företag och anställda vid privatisering?"", Ekonomisk Debatt 4:21-31.
2. Hyytinen, Ari, and Joacim Tåg. “Suomalaisyritykset hyötyisivät yhteiseurooppalaisesta yhtiömuodosta.” Kauppalehti, December 16, 2024.
3. Gardberg, Malin, Fredrik Heyman, Martin Olsson and Joacim Tåg. 2024. Exponering mot generativ AI i Sverige – en kartläggning, Ekonomisk Debatt 6: 17-32.
4. Tåg, Joacim. “Förbättra villkoren för snabbväxande bolag i EU” Dagens Industri, October 28, 2024.
5. Gardberg, Malin, Fredrik Heyman, Martin Olsson, and Joacim Tåg. “Så riskerar AI att öka klyftorna i samhället” Dagens Industri, September 6, 2024.
6. Söderberg, Bengt, and Joacim Tåg. “Regeringen måste säkra linjer till Arlanda.” Svenska Dagbladet, July 10, 2023.
7. Miettinen, Topi, and Joacim Tåg. “Perintövero ei ole välttämättä perheyritykselle pahasta.” Helsingin Sanomat, August 31, 2023.
8. Tåg, Joacim. “Sverige behöver en blockkedjestrategi.” Svenska Dagbladet, January 17, 2022.
9. Keloharju, Matti, Samuli Knüpfer, and Joacim Tåg. “Så når fler kvinnor toppen.” Dagens Industri, October 19, 2018.
10. Olsson, Martin, and Joacim Tåg. 2017. Påverkar riskkapitalinvesteringar anställda och samhällsekonomin?”Ekonomisk Debatt 8: 26–36.
11. Koptyug, Nikita, Lars Persson, Roger Svensson, and Joacim Tåg. 2017. “Aktiemarknadens betydelse för näringslivet och samhällsekonomin.” Ekonomisk Debatt 7: 6–17.
12. Lerner, Josh, and Joacim Tåg. “Mer måste göras nu för framtida tillväxt.” Svenska Dagbladet, July 13, 2012.
13. Jordahl, Henrik, and Joacim Tåg. “Riskkapitalbolag är bra ägare.” Svenska Dagbladet, November 2011.