According to Swedish penal code, there is a “rebate” on all prison sentences before the 21st birthday. We exploit this age discontinuity to investigate how individuals respond to harsher punishments. We use a large Swedish dataset, including dates for all crimes which led to convictions for...

Board room quotas have recently received an increasing amount of attention. This paper provides novel evidence on firm performance from an exogenous change in female board participation in Sweden. We use the credible threat, aimed at listed firms, of a quota law enacted by the Swedish deputy...

We present the first system developed for automated grading of high school essays written in Swedish. The system uses standard text quality indicators and is able to compare vocabulary and grammar to large reference corpora of blogposts and newspaper articles. The system is evaluated on a...

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...

Sweden has a school voucher system with universal coverage and full acceptance of corporate providers. Using a value added approach, we find that students at upper-secondary voucher schools on average score 0.06 standard deviations lower on externally graded standardized tests in first year core...

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...

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). There are two new...

Girls outperform boys in school. Part of the difference in educational results may be due to discrimination of boys in grading. We rigorously test this in a field experiment using blind and non-blind grading of tests. We find no evidence of discrimination against boys

The Western world exhibited a significant trend towards larger local governments in the twentieth century, which was driven to a large extent by boundary reforms. Boundary reforms can provide economic benefits, but may also give rise to costs driven by opportunistic political behavior. This...

We exploit a quasi-experiment to provide new evidence on the magnitude of the housing wealth effect. We estimate an immediate shock of approximately $-$15% to house prices close to one of Stockholm's airports after its operations were unexpectedly continued. This source of price variation is...