This paper presents and empirically evaluates an analytical experiment, in which individual level explanations of differences in political participation are translated to an organizational level. Utilizing the ‘Civic Voluntarism Model’ of participation research, we analyse consequences of voluntary associations’ potentially politically valuable ‘resources’, ‘motivation’ and ‘recruitment networks’. We use unique data from a survey of ethnic associations in Stockholm, Sweden—which may be considered as particularly interesting since in Swedish integration policy such associations are expected to fulfil a formal political role. Estimating a series of regression models, our results suggest that the overall logic of how associational level political participation is encouraged resembles corresponding mechanisms on the individual level. We find that quite basic resources, such as the number of members in a given association, promote participation; also when motivation, as reflected in assessed importance of political influence, is accounted for. Similarly, the results confirm that access to political networks stimulates political participation among voluntary associations. We conclude that both our theoretical argument and empirical findings merit further analyses of ethnic associations as well as other collective actors' political participation in accordance with the approach taken in this study.

There are legal grounds to hear competitors in merger control proceedings, and competitor involvement has gained significance. To what extent this is economically sensible is our question. The competition authority applies some welfare standard while the competitor cares about its own profit. In expectation, there is neither a pure conflict  nor a complete alignment of interest. We distinguish hard and soft information and ask whether hearing the competitor might convey valuable but non-verifiable information to the authority. We find that the authority will mostly have to ignore the competitor's cheap talk but, depending on the authority's own prior information, strictly following the competitor's selfish recommendation can improve the authority's decision. Under a consumer welfare standard, non-verifiable information should be ignored. Complementary to our analysis, we provide empirical data of competitor involvement in EU merger cases and give an overview of the legal discussion in the EU and US.

By conducting a field experiment, we examined whether conveying descriptive social norms (e.g., “this is what most people do”) leads to more charitable giving compared to industry standard appeals. Moreover, we examined whether people are more likely to conform to the local norms of one’s immediate environment than to more global norms extending beyond one’s local environment. University students received a charity organization’s information brochure and were asked for a monetary contribution. An experimental descriptive norm manipulation was embedded in the brochure. We found that providing people with descriptive norms increased charitable giving substantially compared with industry standard altruistic appeals (control condition). Moreover, conveying local norms were more effective in increasing charitable giving than conveying global norms. Practical implications for charity organizations and marketing are proposed.

Although discrimination against disabled people has been investigated in the labor market, the housing market has received less attention in this regard. This paper focuses on the latter market and investigates whether blind tenants assisted by guide dogs are discriminated against in the rental housing market. The data are collected through a field experiment in which written applications were sent in response to online advertisements posted by different types of advertisers. I find statistically significant evidence that one type of online advertiser, that is, the apartment owner (i.e., a person who advertises and rents out his/her own apartment(s) on his/her own), discriminates against blind tenants, because of the presence of the guide dog, not because of the disability. According to the legislation, this behavior qualifies as illegal discrimination.

A large theoretical and empirical literature explores whether politicians and political parties change their policy positions in response to voters’ preferences. This paper asks the opposite question: do political parties affect public attitudes on important policy issues? Problems of reverse causality and omitted variable bias make this a difficult question to answer empirically. We study attitudes towards nuclear energy and immigration in Sweden using panel data from 290 municipal election areas. To identify causal effects, we take advantage of large nonlinearities in the function which assigns council seats, comparing otherwise similar elections where one party either barely wins or loses an additional seat. We estimate that a one seat increase for the anti-nuclear party reduces support for nuclear energy in that municipality by 18%. In contrast, when an anti-immigration politician gets elected, negative attitudes towards immigration decrease by 7%, which is opposite the party’s policy position. Consistent with the estimated changes in attitudes, the anti-nuclear party receives more votes in the next election after gaining a seat, while the anti-immigrant party experiences no such incumbency advantage. The rise of the anti-immigration party is recent enough to permit an exploration of possible mechanisms using several ancillary data sources. We find causal evidence that gaining an extra seat draws in lower quality politicians, reduces negotiated refugee quotas, and increases negative newspaper coverage of the anti-immigrant party at the local level. Our finding that politicians can shape public attitudes has important implications for the theory and estimation of how voter preferences enter into electoral and political economy models. 

In this study, we investigate whether ethnic discrimination depends on labor market tightness. While ranking models predict a negative relationship, the prediction of screening models is ambiguous about the direction of the relationship. Thus, the direction of the relationship is purely an empirical issue. We utilize three (but combine into two) correspondence studies of the Swedish labor market and two distinctly different measures of labor market tightness. These different measures produce very similar results, showing that a one percent increase in labor market tightness increases ethnic discrimination in hiring by 0.5- 0.7 percent, which is consistent with a screening model. This result stands in sharp contrast to the only previous study on this matter, Baert et al. (forthcoming), which finds evidence that supports a ranking model.

The expansion of legal rights to same-sex couples is afoot in a number of Western countries. The effects of this rollout are not only important in their own right but can also provide a window on the institution of marriage and the rights bundled therein. In this article, using Swedish longitudinal register data covering 1994–2007, we study the impact of the extension of rights to same-sex couples on labor earnings and fertility. In 1994, registered partnership for same-sex couples was introduced, which conferred almost all rights and obligations of marriage—a notable exception being joint legal parenting, by default or election. The latter was added in the 2002 adoption act. We find registered partnership to be important to both gays and lesbians but for different reasons. For gays, resource pooling emerges as the main function of registered partnerships. For lesbians, registered partnership appears to be an important vehicle for family formation, especially after the 2002 adoption act. In contrast to heterosexual couples (included for comparison), we find no evidence of household specialization among lesbians. The lack of specialization is noteworthy given similar fertility effects of registered partnership (after 2002) and the fact that lesbian couples were less assortatively matched (on education) than heterosexual couples—children and unequal earnings power being two factors commonly believed to promote specialization.

It is well-documented that there exists ethnic discrimination in the regular housing market in European and US cities. However, the existing literature has so far neglected the informal market for shared housing. We use a field experiment to investigate ethnic discrimination in this market. We sent fictitious inquiries with a randomly assigned name signaling a British, Eastern-European, Indian, African, or Arabic/Muslim background to more than 5,000 room advertisers in the Greater London Area. Our main finding is that ethnic discrimination is widespread. We also find that the degree of discrimination depends on the applicant’s occupation and the ethnic residential concentration.

We study tipping behaviour in residential mobility of the native population in Sweden between 1990 and 2007. Using regression discontinuity methods, we find that the native population growth in a neighbourhood discontinuously drops once the share of non-European immigrants exceeds the identified tipping point. Native tipping behaviour can be ascribed to both native flight and native avoidance. Natives with a high level of educational attainment and the highest labour earnings are more likely to move from neighbourhoods that have tipped. We conclude that tipping behaviour is likely to be associated with ethnic as well as to socio-economic segregation in Sweden.  

This paper is a study of exit rates from self-employment among immigrants in Sweden. A survey was administered to all immigrants who became self-employed during the period 2001–2005 and to the members of a native comparison group. The respondents were then followed up to the year 2010. Immigrants were found to have a lower propensity than natives of exiting self-employment for wage-employment but a higher propensity than natives of exiting self-employment for unemployment or for economic inactivity. Oaxaca-Blinder decompositions are conducted to study the extent to which different background characteristics affect differences in exit rates between immigrants and natives. In line with previous research, we find that labour market and self-employment experience prior to self-employment as well as access to financial capital are important explanations for the difference between non-European immigrants and natives in exit rates from self-employment to unemployment and to being economically inactive.

We investigate the gender wage gap upon labor market entry among recent college graduates in Sweden and find a raw male-female wage gap of 12 percent. After adding controls for pre-labor market factors, only a gap of approximately 2.9 percent remains. Hence, pre-labor market factors, and especially the type of college major, explain the bulk of the initial gender wage gap, and there is little that can be attributed to employer discrimination. However, given the high minimum wages in the Swedish labor market discrimination may not be apparent in wages. Instead, employers may discriminate against women in hiring. Using data from a hiring experiment, we do not find any evidence of this. On the contrary, female job applicants tend to be preferred over male job applicants.

Most OECD countries experience high unemployment rates and declining growth in higher educational attainment. An often suggested government policy is therefore to allocate resources towards formal schooling for adults. However, returns on such investments are uncertain and the foregone earnings are potentially large. We use Swedish population register data from 1982 to 2011 to estimate average long run earnings returns on higher education for 29- to 55-year-olds who enrolled 1992-1993. We find substantial positive estimates, but these only fully emerge after approximately ten years. Nevertheless, calculations indicate that the benefits for society exceed the costs also under fairly pessimistic assumptions.

Bertrand et al. (2015) show that among married couples in the US, the distribution of the share of the household income earned by the wife exhibits a sharp drop just to the right of .50. They argue that this drop is consistent with a social norm prescribing that a man should earn more than his wife. We repeat this analysis for Sweden, ranked as one of the world’s most gender equal countries. Analyzing Swedish population register data, we do not find support for the norm that a man should earn more than his wife.

The study combines the large Swedish register data at individual level with the unemployment data at region level to investigate to what extent the entry into self-employment, particular among immigrants, are affected by the local business cycle. We show that local unemployment rate negatively affects the entry into self-employment among native men and immigrant men, except immigrants from Middle East. Moreover, such pull effect is weaker among non-European immigrants’ men. Furthermore, the result shows that Middle Eastern immigrants’ men are pushed into self-employment in economic downturns. Similar with men, our results show that the local unemployment rate also negatively affects women’s entry into self-employment except immigrants from Middle East. However, this negative effect is quantitatively much smaller than among men, indicating thebusiness cycle plays a less important role in determining women’s self-employment entry decision.

Könsskillnader som finns på arbetsmarknaden gäller oberoende av sexuell läggning, skriver professorn i nationalekonomi Mats Hammarstedt vid Linnéuniversitetet.

Mentoring of immigrants and refugees is a policy measure widely used across the world and has been so for some years. However, there is surprisingly little empirical evidence. This study investigates the impact of a mentoring programme on the labour market status of newly arrived refugees. The programme was conducted in Sweden between 2010 and 2012. The key finding of the study is that male participants after participating have moved closer to the core labour market and that there is little that relates to the content of the mentoring programme that affect the outcome.

A central question for social psychologists is to what extent attitudes, prejudice, and stereotypes are precursors of ethnic and racial discrimination. Operationalized, this question can be framed as the extent measures of such constructs predict differential treatment of individuals from one group compared to a comparison group. Yet, in the literature, it is common to substitute this operationalization for a simpler one: measures predicting behavior toward a single group. We argue that this simpler operationalization lacks validity and yields uninformative effect sizes. We provide several suggestions on how to include, and make most use of, comparison groups, when predicting discrimination.

In sports and education contexts, children are divided into age groups that are arbitrary constructions based on admission dates. This age-group system is thought to determine differences in maturity between pupils within the same group, that is, relative age (RA). In turn, these within-age-group maturity differences produce performance gaps, that is, relative age effects (RAEs), which might persist and affect labor market outcomes. I analyze the RAE on labor market outcomes using a unique dataset of a particular group of highskilled workers: soccer players in the Italian major soccer league. In line with previous studies, evidence on the existence of an RAE in terms of representativeness is found, meaning that players born relatively early in an age group are over-represented, while players born relatively late are under-represented, even accounting for specific population trends. Moreover, players born relatively late in an age group receive lower gross wages than players born relatively early. This wage gap seems to increase with age and in the quantile of the wage distribution.

Although the self-employment rate is high in many developing countries, the job quality of self employment has been little studied. Instead of using earnings, this paper uses life satisfaction as a proxy for individual total welfare. Using data from the China Family Panel Studies, we study the self-employment effect on life satisfaction. We find the life satisfaction of self-employed men is significantly higher than that of wage-employed men; the life satisfaction of self-employed women is not significantly different from that of wage-employed women. To address the informality of labour market, our results suggest that there is no sign that the life satisfaction of the self-employed in the informal sector is significantly lower than that of wage-employed in the formal private sector for both men and women.

This paper presents results from a study of sexual prejudice and differentials in labor market outcomes due to sexual orientation. It uses data from a nationwide Swedish survey on public attitudes toward homosexuals, conducted in 1999, and combines them with register data for 2007, which include information about sexual orientation, employment status, and yearly earnings for the total population in Sweden. It finds that prejudice against homosexuals negatively affects the relative employment and relative earnings of gay men. Lesbians are affected negatively by prejudice against homosexuals in terms of employment, but the relationship is less clear in regard to earnings. Discrimination against homosexuals, as well as social norms, occupational sorting and self-selection in, geographic mobility are presented as explanations for the results.

To identify the causal effect of schooling on cognitive skills, we exploit conditionally random variation in the date Swedish males take a battery of cognitive tests in preparation for military service. We find an extra 10 days of school instruction raises scores on crystallized intelligence tests (synonym and technical comprehension tests) by approximately one percent of a standard deviation, whereas extra nonschool days have almost no effect. In contrast, test scores on fluid intelligence tests (spatial and logic tests) do not increase with additional days of schooling, but do increase modestly with age.

Denna artikel ger en bild av utrikes föddas position på den svenska arbetsmarknaden under 2000-talet. Utrikes födda från Afrika och Asien har lägre sysselsättningsgrad och högre andel arbetslösa än andra grupper av utrikes födda och infödda. De är också överrepresenterade i tidsbegränsade anställningar och underrepresenterade på chefspositioner. Högutbildade personer från dessa regioner har oftare än andra personer arbeten som kräver lägre kompetens än deras formella utbildningsnivå. Vidare utmärker sig högutbildade kvinnor från Afrika och Asien genom ett lågt arbetskraftsdeltagande. En diskussion förs om olika tänkbara förklaringar till situationen.

Antidiscrimination policies play an important role in public discussions. However, identifying discriminatory practices in the labor market is not an easy task. Correspondence testing provides a credible way to reveal discrimination in hiring and provide hard facts for policies. What is this instrument? What does it show and how reliable is it? Should it be widely used for policymaking? Answers to these questions are provided

A rich data set gives a unique opportunity to study heterogeneity in intergenerational mobility. Here, we explore whether the intergenerational association in education and income is the same for children with different results in a cognitive ability test (the Swedish Military Enlistment test). Despite an endogenous test score, the argument is that this is the policy relevant case to analyze, i.e. whether children of a certain cognitive ability level are influences by their parents’ socioeconomic status and not whether they are influenced by some random parent.The intergenerational associations vary a great deal with the results in the cognitive ability test. The intergenerational association is highest for the middle ability groups and lower for both the higher ability and (particularly) the lower ability groups. The overall conclusion is that adding the cognitive ability dimension to studies of intergenerational mobility contributes new and important insights. For example, since the average child (cognitively speaking) seems to be most receptive to parental influence, intergenerational mobility is primarily increased by targeting the average child.

Whereas a large literature has shown the importance of early life health for adult socioeconomic outcomes, there is little evidence on the importance of adolescent health. We contribute to the literature by studying the impact of adolescent health status on adult labor market outcomes using a unique and large-scale dataset covering almost the entire population of Swedish males. We show that most types of major conditions have long-run effects on future outcomes, and that the strongest effects result from mental conditions. Including sibling fixed effects or twin pair fixed effects reduces the magnitudes of the estimates, but they remain substantial. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Whereas a large literature has shown the importance of early life health for adult socioeconomic outcomes, there is little evidence on the importance of adolescent health. We contribute to the literature by studying the impact of adolescent health status on adult labor market outcomes using a unique and large-scale dataset covering almost the entire population of Swedish males. We show that most types of major conditions have long-run effects on future outcomes, and that the strongest effects result from mental conditions. Including sibling fixed effects or twin pair fixed effects reduces the magnitudes of the estimates but they remain substantial.

Researchers as well as policymakers often view self-employment as an important factor behind innovation and economic growth and policies that foster self-employment has been on the agenda in several European countries during the last decades. The Jack-of-all-trades theory argues that individuals with a balanced set of skills are more suitable for self-employment than others. In this paper we test this theory using Swedish Military Enlistment data. This data enables us to construct a measure of balance in endowed abilities that, incomparison to measures used in previous research, is less contaminated by endogeneity problems. Specifically, we measure balance in skills using the result from the tests of cognitive and non-cognitive ability taken at military enlistment. We find clear support for the Jack-of-all-trades theory, in the sense that the likelihood of being self-employed or switching into self-employment is higher for individuals who are more balanced in their in abilities. In addition, earnings from self-employment tend to be higher among individuals with a more balanced set of skills.

We provide new evidence on the long-run labor market penalty of teenage overweight and obesity using unique and large-scale data on 150,000 male siblings from the Swedish military enlistment. Our empirical analysis provides four important results. First, we provide the first evidence of a large adult male labor market penalty for being overweight or obese as a teenager. Second, we replicate this result using data from the United States and the United Kingdom. Third, we note a strikingly strong within-family relationship between body size and cognitive skills/noncognitive skills. Fourth, a large part of the estimated body-size penalty reflects lower skill acquisition among overweight and obese teenagers. Taken together, these results reinforce the importance of policy combating early-life obesity in order to reduce healthcare expenditures as well as poverty and inequalities later in life.

We identify the ages that constitute sensitive (or critical) periods in children’s development towards their adult health status. For this we use data on families migrating into Sweden from countries that are poorer, with less healthy conditions. Long-run health is proxied by adult height. The relation between siblings’ ages at migration and their heights after age 18 allows us to estimate the causal effect of conditions at certain ages on adult height. We effectively exploit that for siblings the migration occurs simultaneously in calendar time but at different developmental stages (ages). We find evidence that the period just before the puberty growth spurt constitutes a critical period. We also study adult cognitive score outcomes and we compare sensitive age periods for cognitive ability to those for height.

This paper studies the role of social norms and attitudes about gender, i.e. culture, for labour market behaviour and cultural assimilation of immigrants in Sweden. Using source country gender gaps as cultural proxies we find that the labour force participation of immigrants in Sweden is related to culture, in the sense that immigrants originating from countries with high gender gaps in labour force participation rates (LFPR) also have high gender gaps in LFPR within their immigrant group on the Swedish labour market. On the contrary, high source country gender gaps in earnings are, if anything, associated with lower gender gaps in earnings within immigrant groups in Sweden. In addition, we find that gender gaps in LFPR among immigrants in Sweden assimilate towards the corresponding gap among natives as time in Sweden increases. These results suggest that culture is one explanation for the existence of gender gaps in LFPR and that cultural assimilation takes place as time since exposure to the source country culture increases.

En nyligen publicerad rapport visar på stora skillnader på arbetsmarknaden. Sannolikheten att stå utanför arbetskraften är 2,5 gånger högre för högutbildade kvinnor från Afrika eller Asien än för andra grupper, skriver Lina Aldén och Mats Hammarstedt vid Linnéuniversitetet.

We present results from a survey regarding access to financial capital conducted among immigrants who are self-employed in private firms in Sweden's retail, trade or service sectors. The results show that non-European immigrants consider access to financial capital as a more serious impediment to their self-employment activities than do native Swedes and European immigrants. Self-employed non-European immigrants report more discrimination by banks, suppliers and customers than do natives and immigrants from European countries. Immigrant owned firms apply for bank loans to a larger extent than do firms owned by natives. Non-European immigrants are more likely than natives of having a loan denial and they are also charged higher interest rates on their bank loans than natives are. The occurrence of ethnic discrimination in the market for bank loans is put forward as an explanation for these results. Limited or no access to financial capital is an obstacle for self-employment among certain immigrant groups. This obstacle may be one explanation for the high exit rates from self-employment among immigrants that has been documented in several countries including Sweden.

Discrimination in the housing market may create large economic inefficiencies and unfair individual outcomes, but is very difficult to measure. To circumvent the problems with unobserved heterogeneity, most recent studies use the correspondence testing approach (i.e. sending fictitious inquiries to landlords). In this study, we generalize the existing methodology in order to facilitate a test of to what extent the measured degree of discrimination depends on applicant, landlord/apartment, and regional characteristics. To show how this more general methodology can be implemented, we investigate the effects of gender, ethnicity, age, and employment status in the Swedish rental market for apartments. Our results confirm the existence of widespread discrimination against some of the groups, but also show that the degree of discrimination varies substantially with landlord, apartment, and regional characteristics. This heterogeneity highlights the importance of using a broad approach when conducting correspondence studies. Our results also allow us to interpret the nature of discrimination and how it relates to segregation and geographical sorting. (C) 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Vi presenterar resultaten från en enkätundersökning riktad till utrikes födda företagare. Företagare födda i länder utanför Europa upplever sig diskriminerade av kunder, leverantörer och banker i högre grad än andra företagare. De har en högre sannolikhet att få avslag på låneansökningar i banker och betalar högre ränta på beviljade banklån. Resultaten är i linje med vad som framkommit i studier från andra länder. Vi drar slutsatsen att diskriminering, åtminstone delvis, förklarar resultaten. Då en allt större andel utrikes födda i Sverige är aktiva som egenföretagare belyser våra resultat en problematik som är central för integrationen av utrikes födda på arbetsmarknaden.

Correspondence studies can identify the extent of discrimination in hiring as typically defined by the law, which includes discrimination against ethnic minorities and females. However, as Heckman and Siegelman (1993) show, if employers act upon a group difference in the variance of unobserved variables, this measure of discrimination may not be very informative. This issue has essentially been ignored in the empirical literature until the recent methodological development by Neumark (2012). We apply Neumark’s method to a number of already published correspondence studies. We find the Heckman and Siegelman critique relevant for empirical work and give suggestions on how future correspondence studies may address this critique.

”Samer, kurder och judar kan få leva i Sverige – men de är inte svenskar”, hävdade Sverigedemokraternas partisekreterare Björn Söder i Dagens Nyheter och följde i SVT:s Aktuellt upp med att vara tveksam till huruvida det går att vara hundra procent svensk och hundra procent kurd samtidigt.

We present a large survey with responses from Swedish firms on their attitudes towardsrefugees, regarding hiring, job performance, wage setting and discrimination. There is a greatdeal of heterogeneity in attitudes, but experience of having refugees on the payroll reducesnegative attitudes to them. Firms’ reasons for ceasing to have refugees as employees are notrelated to discrimination of refugees by staff or customers, but rather to poor job performance.While most firms agree with statements that wage cuts negatively affect worker cohesion,effort or the quality of applicants, employers who consider such cuts as employmentenhancing tend to not agree.#

This paper provides evidence of segregation-generated differences in political recruitment. Focusing on social-geographical differentiation in the urban landscape, we evaluate—in prior work largely neglected—contextual effects on requests for political participation. Consistent with previous research, our analyses suggest that political activists, who try to convince others to participate, systematically use a set of selection criteria when deciding whom to approach. However, using data based on a sample of inhabitants of Swedish cities and properties of their neighbourhoods, we also present evidence for aggregate-level social exclusion influences on individual-level recruitment efforts. Consistent with our theoretical framework, results indicate that the contextual effect stems both from the disproportional population composition in residential areas, and from recruiters‘ rational avoidance of areas marked by high levels of social exclusion. The net result, we conclude, is a reinforcement of urban inequalities when it comes to the chances to be invited to political life

This study uses US survey data (NLSY) and Swedish register data to estimate the relationship between returns to schooling and ability for each country separately. A significant and positive relationship is found for Sweden but not for the US. The purpose is to propose an explanation for why such differences might occur. While many studies have focused on whether credit constraints result in inefficiencies in the schooling market, this study answers the opposite question: whether weak credit constraints lead to inefficiencies, in other words in an overuse of the schooling system. It is argued argue that the US schooling system more effectively sorts out education investments with a low rate of return to schooling than the Swedish schooling system. Therefore, an imperfect allocation of individuals going to higher education in Sweden makes a relationship between returns to schooling and ability observable in Sweden but not in the US. Since the relationship between returns to schooling and ability is the same when the schooling systems of the two countries is similar, that is at lower levels of education, it is indicative of the fact that this explanation may be correct. Of course, the empirical findings in this study are not convincing evidence on their own, but the findings suggest and agree with such an explanation.

This paper uses new data to illustrate the position of the foreign-born on the Swedish labour market. Foreign-born Africans and Asians have a lower employment and a higher unemployment rate than other groups. They are overrepresented in fixed-time employment and underrepresented in managerial positions. Employment is particularly low among family and refugee immigrants. Educated people from these regions are more likely than others to have jobs requiring lower competencies than their educational level. Lack of human capital acquired in Sweden and lack of access to networks as well as prevalence of discrimination are put forward as explanations for this.

Differences in job search behaviour and access to high quality informal networks may be an important reason why immigrants fare worse than natives in many European labour markets. In this study, we design and conduct a survey of newly hired workers in the Swedish labour market to analyse if there are ethnic differences in the choice of search intensity/methods and in the successful search method for finding the job. We also investigate if the wage and other characteristics of the new job differ depending on the search method resulting in a job. Our data includes very detailed information about the workers’ job search, their informal networks, and the characteristics of their new jobs.We find that immigrants use all search methods more than natives, but that they inparticular rely more on informal search. Moreover, we show that, for immigrants, the search method resulting in a job is more likely to be informal search through their relatives and friends. However, we also find that jobs obtained through this search channel are associated with lower wages.

In many European labour markets, workers born outside Europe are less successful than natives. A potential explanation for these differences is ethnic differences in job search behaviour and access to high-quality informal networks, but a lack of appropriate data makes it difficult to investigate the importance of this explanation. In this study, we use data from a survey conducted in the Swedish labour market to analyze if there are ethnic differences in the choice of search intensity/methods and in the search method that resulted in a job (the successful search method). Moreover, we investigate if the wage and other characteristics of the new job differ depending on the successful search method. Our data includes detailed information about the workers’ job search and the characteristics of the new job. We find that immigrants use all search methods more intensely than natives, but that they in particular rely more on informal search methods. Moreover, we find that, for immigrants, the successful search method is more likely to be informal search through relatives and friends. However, we also find that jobs found through this search channel are associated with lower wages. One interpretation of these results is that that immigrants perceive their chance of finding a job as so low that they are willing to accept low-paying jobs obtained through their family and friends.

This paper is the first to estimate the effects of minimum wages on the unemployment of refugee immigrants. The collectively agreed minimum wages raise both the incidence of unemployment and days in unemployment considerably for male refugees in Sweden; different estimation methods and models yield robust elasticities in the 1.8–2.0 range. The effects for young male natives are about half as large. There are heterogeneous effects with regard to country of origin and time of residence in Sweden for both male and female refugees. We account for spatial trends – a concern in some of the recent literature – as well as industrial trends. It turns out that only the latter affect our results.

Politiker pekar ofta på att ökat företagande bland utrikes födda ska minska arbetslösheten. Men ett hinder för detta är att en enkät bland företagare visar att över 20 procent av dem som är födda i länder utanför Europa upplever sig ha blivit diskriminerade vid kontakter med banker. Det skriver Lina Aldén och Mats Hammarstedt, nationalekonomer vid Linnéuniversitetet i Växjö.