Supervised by Prof Richard Friberg at the Department of Economics, the dissertation is being recognized for its “significant contributions to central questions about market structure and competitive conditions”. This is the second accolade for Tove’s research work at SSE, following the Peter Högfeldt Award for Outstanding PhD Thesis. 

In "The Evolution of Competition: The Role of Institutional Ownership, Measurement, and Regulation", Tove examines how competition has changed over the past decades in three self-contained essays.

The first essay documents widespread use of the same proxy advisor by institutional investors which is associated with a softening of competition.

The second essay explores estimation of markups, a key measure of competition. The essay provides a novel empirical assessment of the production approach to estimate markups, finding support for the usefulness of the approach. A revised version of the paper is accepted for publication in Review of Economics and Statistics.

The third essay, joint work with Catarina Marvão (University College Dublin) and Chloé Le Coq  (University Paris Panthéon-Assas and SITE/SSE) investigates the interplay between antitrust rules and cartel formation using historical data from Sweden. This paper is published in International Journal of Industrial Organization.