This study analyses whether the Swedish school choice reform, enacted in 1992, had different effects on students from different socio-economic backgrounds. We use detailed geographical data on students' and schools' locations to construct measures of the degree of potential choice. This allows...

This paper evaluates the effects of a major Swedish school choice reform. The reform in 1992 increased school choice and competition among public schools as well as through a large-scale introduction of private schools. We estimate the effects of school choice and competition, using precise...

Card et al (2008a) formalize a model of ethnic residential segregation where an ethnically mixed neighborhood is dynamically stable until its minority share reaches a threshold (the tipping point). Once the neighborhood has surpassed the tipping point, it will experience massive white flight....

Earlier studies on income inequality and crime have typically used total income or total earnings. However, it is quite likely that it is changes in permanent rather than in transitory income that affects crime rates. The purpose of this paper is therefore to disentangle the two effects by,...

This paper investigates to what extent voters and politicians have the same preferences for locally provided welfare services. We make use of two different types of survey questionnaires; one directed towards voters and one directed towards politicians. We reach two main conclusions in the...

Bureaucrats in the government sector have a double role since they are both suppliers and demanders of public employment; they are publicly employed (supply labor) and they have an important say in deciding the size of the municipal employment (demand labor). In this paper we present and...

Recent research claims that the major part of the observed reduction in suicide rates during the 1990's can be explained by the increase in the prescription of antidepressants. This conclusion is however based on research that only looks at raw correlations; confounding effects from other...

Do governments increase public employment in election years? This paper investigates this question by using data from Sweden and Finland, two coun¬tries that are similar in many respects but in which local elections are held at different points in time. We can thereby separate an election...

This paper estimates a locational choice model to assess the demand for local public services, using a data set where individuals chooses between 26 municipalities within a local labor market. We assess the importance of the IIA assumption by comparing the predictions of three difference models;...