Björn Tyrefors Hinnerich

We rigorously test for discrimination against students with foreign backgrounds in high school grading in Sweden. We analyse a random sample of national tests in the Swedish language graded both non-blindly by the student's own teacher and blindly without any identifying information. The increase in the test score due to non-blind grading is significantly higher for students with a Swedish background. This discrimination effect is sizeable, about 10% of the mean or 20% of the standard deviation of the blind test score.

In this paper, we compare how two different types of political regimes—direct versus representative democracy—redistribute income toward the relatively poor segments of society after the introduction of universal and equal suffrage. Swedish local governments are used as a testing ground since this setting offers a number of attractive features for a credible impact evaluation. Most importantly, we exploit the existence of a population threshold, which partly determined a local government's choice of democracy to implement a regression-discontinuity design. The results indicate that direct democracies spend 40–60 percent less on public welfare. Our interpretation is that direct democracy may be more prone to elite capture than representative democracy since the elite's potential to exercise de facto power is likely to be greater in direct democracy after democratization.

We use a field experiment to measure discrimination in the housing market in Stockholm. Four fictitious persons, of different gender, with distinct-sounding Arabic or Swedish names, are randomly assigned to vacant apartments. We extend the study by Ahmed and Hammarstedt ( 2008 Ahmed, A. M. and Hammarstedt, M. 2008. Discrimination in the rental housing market. Journal of Urban Economics, 64: 362–72. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] [Google Scholar] ). There are two new results. First, we provide evidence that there is no or little gender premium for the female with the Arabic name, which suggests that ethnic discrimination dominates the effects of gender. Second, discriminatory behaviour is only found in the suburbs or satellite cities/towns of Stockholm County not in the densely populated, affluent, city centre. Moreover, we can replicate that there is a gender premium for females with Swedish names. However, we are not able to confirm that males with Arabic names face discrimination.