Recent immigrants tend to locate in ethnic ‘enclaves’ within metropolitan areas. The economic consequence of living in such enclaves is still an unresolved issue. We use an immigrant policy initiative in Sweden, when government authorities distributed refugee immigrants across locales in a...

We study the impact of job proximity on individual employment and earnings. The analysis exploits a Swedish refugee dispersal policy to get exogenous variation in individual locations. Using very detailed data on the exact location of all residences and workplaces in Sweden, we find that having...

Many developed countries, e.g. the UK, Germany, and Sweden, use or have used settlement policies to direct the inflow of new immigrants away from immigrant dense metropolitan areas. We evaluate a reform of Swedish immigration policy that featured dispersion of refugee immigrants across the...

This Paper analyses transitions into and out of three different labour market states: social assistance, unemployment and employment. We estimate a dynamic multinomial logit model, controlling for endogenous initial conditions and unobserved heterogeneity, using a large representative Swedish...

Using data from the European Social Survey on most European countries, we look at the relationship between ethnic identity and employment prospects for immigrants from non-European countries. We find that a strong attachment to religion is associated with a lower probability of being employed....

We evaluate the empirical relevance of de facto vs. de jure determinants of political power in the U.S. South between the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. We apply a variety of estimation techniques to a previously unexploited dataset on voter registration by...

We investigate the long term determinants of political and economic outcomes over a new data set composed of Mississippi counties. We analyze the effect of disfranchisement on voting registration at the end of the nineteenth century (1896-9), as well as the impact of voting registration on...

We develop a theory of political transitions inspired in part by the experiences of Western Europe and Latin America. Nondemocratic societies are controlled by a rich elite. The initially disenfranchised poor can contest power by threatening social unrest or revolution, and this may force the...

Regimes controlled by a rich elite often collapse and make way for democracy amidst widespread social unrest. Such regime changes are often followed by redistribution to the poor at the expense of the former elite. We argue that the reason why the elite may have to resort to full-scale...

We investigate the origin and evolution of the legal institution of citizenship from a political economy perspective. We compile a new data set on citizenship laws across countries of the world which documents how these institutions have evolved in the postwar period. We show that, despite a...