Ethnic Diversity and Preferences for Redistribution

By M. Dahlberg, Karin Edmark, Heléne Lundqvist. Journal of Political Economy, 2011

469 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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).

Subfields: Demography, Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5249820a4c92501dbaf3d73bef36285a8e06434b

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Demography

In Economics and Econometrics

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Migrant Networks and Trade: The Vietnamese Boat People as a Natural Experiment (2018, unknown): “For example: in Sweden by Edin et al. (2003) who estimate the causal effect of immigration on labor market outcomes, by Dahlberg et al. (2012) to estimate the effect 8Relations between the two nations improved following a sustained effort by the Hanoi Government to assist US forensic teams locate…”
ETHNIC DIVERSITY, PUBLIC SPENDING, AND INDIVIDUAL SUPPORT FOR THE WELFARE STATE: A REVIEW OF THE EMPIRICAL LITERATURE (2013, unknown): “(The recent study by Dahlberg et al. (2011), summarized below, also uses individual-level panel data, and has the additional advantage of exploiting exogenous variation stemming from a refugee-placement program.)”
Gifts of the Immigrants, Woes of the Natives: Lessons from the Age of Mass Migration (2019, unknown): “My findings are consistent with a long-standing idea in the literature that diversity can be economically beneficial because of gains from specialization and complementarity (Alesina and La Ferrara, 2005), but may be politically hard to manage, resulting in lower preferences for redistribution (Dahl”
Collective Action in Diverse Sierra Leone Communities (2013, unknown): “Only a handful of recent studies have exploited experimental or quasi-experimental variation in local diversity, for instance, Algan et al. (2011) and Dahlberg et al. (2012), and neither uses data from developing countries.”
Immigration, Ethnic Diversity, and Political Outcomes: Evidence from Denmark (2018, background): “While most of this body of literature focuses on stable differences in ethnic diversity at a point in time, recent evidence also suggests that immigration-driven increases in ethnic diversity might have a negative effect on left-wing political attitudes and related policy outcomes (Razin et al., 200”
The Social Effects of Ethnic Diversity at the Local Level: A Natural Experiment with Exogenous Residential Allocation (2016, background): “The paper which is the closest to ours is Dahlberg et al. (2012), which uses a nation-wide policy intervention program that exogenously placed refugees coming to Swe-”
Immigration and preferences for redistribution in Europe1 (2019, background): “Since 1980 the share of the foreign-born population has more than doubled in Western Europe, with about two thirds of the increase generated by immigration from outside of Europe.”