We study the migration behavior of the native Swedish population following refugee immigration, with a particular focus on examining whether there is support for an ethnically based migration response. Using rich geo-coded Swedish data, we account for possible endogeneity problems by combining policy-induced initial immigrant settlements with exogenous contemporaneous immigration as captured by refugee shocks. We find the same flight among all natives, irrespective of their parental foreign background. This suggests that ethnic distance to the new immigrants is not the dominant channel causing natives' flight behavior. Instead, refugee immigration seems to lead to more socio-economically segregated neighborhoods.

The paper estimates causal effects of being elected in a local election on monetary returns. The claim for causality is made in a research design where the income of some candidate who just barely won a seat is compared to that of some other candidate who was close to winning a seat for the same party, but ultimately did not. This research design is made possible thanks to a comprehensive, detailed data set covering all Swedish politicians who have run for office in the period 1991-2006. The analysis establishes that monetary returns from local politics are absent both in the short and long run. By relating this null result to effects on the future political career, the paper provides suggestive evidence that local politicians are not primarily motivated by money.

Are there monetary returns to politics? This question is approached in this paper, as one of few to quantify the monetary returns to holding political office in a country with proportional representation system. I apply a difference-in-difference setting with a carefully chosen control group to rich data on candidates to the Swedish national parliament. Both shortand long-run effects of being elected on different types of income are estimated. Results show that, yes, mostly thanks to relatively high remuneration while still in office, politics can yield positive monetary returns. In the long-run however, the effect is instead compositional in the sense that ex-politicians receive more pension income and work less.

The emergence of anti-democratic movements is a central puzzle to social science. We study a novel and rich historical dataset covering Swedish municipalities during the interwar years and find a strong link between the presence of a military garrison and the emergence of fascist parties. We interpret these results as suggesting that fascist mobilization in Sweden was driven by discontent with the process of disarmament brought about by democratization. In contrast, poor economic conditions, as captured both by levels of and changes in the local poverty rate and tax base, do not explain the strong link between the fascists and military garrisons. We relate these results to influential theories of democratization.

Here, we respond to the comments raised by Nekby and Pettersson-Lidbom on our paper Dahlberg et al. (2012, Journal of Political Economy 120, 41-76). We argue that our estimates are internally valid, but we acknowledge that the external validity could have been discussed more thoroughly.

Most of the early empirical estimates on effects of intergovernmental grants contradict theoretical predictions. In the more recent literature that emphasizes the importance of convincing empirical strategies, the results are more mixed. This paper contributes to this literature by estimating causal effects on local expenditures and income taxes of general, unconditional grants. This is done in a difference-in-difference model utilizing policy-induced increases in grants to a group of remotely populated municipalities in Finland. The finding is that increased grants have a statistically and economically significant positive immediate effect on local expenditures. The effect on local income taxes, while statistically significant, is considerably smaller in magnitude. Furthermore, there is no evidence of dynamic crowding-out-i.e., that the immediate response in expenditures is reversed in later years.

We apply the regression kink design to the Swedish grant system and estimate causal effects of intergovernmental grants on local public employment. Our robust conclusion is that grants do not stimulate local public employment. We find no statistically significant effects on total local public employment, and we can exclude even moderate effects. When disaggregating the total effect by sector, we find that personnel in the traditional welfare sectors are unaffected, a conclusion which applies to both publicly and privately employed in these sectors. The only positive and statistically significant effect of grants is that on administrative personnel.

Våra kommunpolitiker ansvarar för tunga välfärdsområden såsom vård, skola och omsorg. Det kan därför tyckas motiverat med en hög kompensation för lokalpolitiskt engagemang. Men hur ser det ut i Sverige, lönar det sig att bli kommunpolitiker? I denna artikel studeras vilken effekt det har på framtida inkomst att bli invald i kommunfullmäktige. Resultaten visar att svensk lokalpolitik inte har något monetärt värde alls – inkomsten påverkas varken direkt efter att man blivit vald, eller upp till femton år senare.

This paper investigates the causal link between the ethnic diversity in a society and its inhabitants' preferences for redistribution. We exploit exogenous variation in immigrant shares stemming from a nationwide program placing refugees in municipalities throughout Sweden during 1985-94 and match data on refugee placement to panel survey data on inhabitants of the receiving municipalities. We find significant, negative effects of increased immigration on the support for redistribution. The effect is especially pronounced among high-income earners. We also establish that estimates from earlier studies failing to identify causal effects are likely to be positively biased (i.e., less negative).