Bo Malmberg

Agglomeration and firm performance: economies of scale, localisation, and urbanisation among Swedish export firms

In the 1990s, there has been an increase in interest in the spatial agglomeration of similar and related firms and industries. The recent literature is, however, marked by a lack of balance between theoretical development and empirical validation of the importance of agglomeration economies. Our aim in this paper is to redress the balance by assessing empirically the impact of various types of agglomeration economies on export performance. Our study is based on a unique data set including all Swedish export firms. We find that localisation economies are not as important as recent theoretical contributions on industrial districts, new industrial spaces, and innovative milieus have led us to believe. Instead, traditional scale economies, together with urbanisation economies, have a larger effect on export performance.

School Choice and Increasing Performance Difference: A Counterfactual Approach

In recent years, structural changes to the school system, including the introduction of independent schools, have increased school choice alternatives in Sweden. Consequently, a large share of today’s students attend a school other than the one closest to home. Since the compulsory school system is designed to be free of charge and to offer the same standard of education everywhere, increasing school choice– hypothetically—should not increase the between-school variation in grades. In reality, however, between-school variation in grades has increased in recent years. The aim of this paper is to test whether increasing between-school variance can be explained by changes in residential patterns, or if it must be attributed to structural change. Using a counterfactual approach, the students’ variations in grades are compared between observed schools of graduation and hypothetical schools of graduation. The multilevel results indicate that school choice seems to increase between-school variation of grades.

A Multiscalar Analysis of Neighborhood Composition in Los Angeles, 2000-2010 : A Location-Based Approach to Segregation and Diversity

There continues to be cross-disciplinary interest in the patterns, extent, and changing contexts of segregation and spatial inequality more generally. The changes are clearly context dependent but at the same time there are broad generalizations that arise from the processes of residential sorting and selection. A major question in U.S. segregation research is how the growth of Asian and Hispanic populations is influencing patterns of segregation and diversity at the neighborhood level. In this article we use a variant of a nearest neighbor approach to map, graph, and evaluate patterns of race and ethnicity at varying scales. We show that using a multiscalar approach to segregation can provide a detailed and more complete picture of segregation. The research confirms work from other studies that segregation is decreasing between some groups and increasing between others, and the patterns, and processes can be described as dynamic diversity. In a series of maps of ethnic clusters and population homogeneity we show how metropolitan areas, represented in this case by Los Angeles, now display patterns of complex living arrangements with multiple groups inhabiting both local neighborhoods and wider community spheres.

Ethnic Segregation and Performance Inequality in the Swedish School System: A Regional Perspective:

Sweden is today an immigrant country with more than 14% foreign born. An increasing share of the immigrants comes from non-European countries. This implies that Sweden has been transformed from an ethnically homogenous country into a country with a large visible minority. In this paper we survey the effect of this change on school segregation. Building on Schellings model for residential segregation, we argue that establishment of a visible minority has triggered a process of school segregation that in some respects can be compared with the developments in the United States. In order to test the validity of a Schelling-type process in Swedish schools we compare segregation levels in regions with different shares of visible minority students. We use data from the PISA 2003 survey in combination with register data on the ethnic composition of student population in different parts of Sweden. We find that school segregation is higher in regions with a large visible-minority population. We also find that, controlling for student background, there are smaller differences in performance across schools in regions with low shares of minority students.

Age structure and inflation - a Wicksellian interpretation of the OECD data

Wicksells cumulative inflation process is founded on the separation of investment and saving decisions. The demographic age structure influences the aggregate of both these decisions, and therefor ...

Can Age Structure Forecast Inflation Trends

The demographic age structure influences the aggregate of individual economic decisions. Standard macroeconomic models imply that inflation pressure will covary with the age distribution unless accommodated by monetary policy. We estimate the relation between inflation and age structure on annual OECD data 1960‐1994 for 20 countries. The result is an age pattern of inflation effects consistent with the hypothesis that increases in the population of net savers dampen inflation, whereas especially the younger retirees fan inflation as they start consuming out of accumulated pension claims. This can be explained, for example, with life-cycle saving behavior combined with a cumulative process of inflation, but other mechanisms are also consistent with the results. In any case, the results suggest that demographic projections may be useful for long- and medium-term inflation forecasts. Forecasts from our panel model catch the general downward trend in OECD inflation in the 1990s. However, useful forecasts for individual countries need to incorporate more country-specific information.

Segregation and Urban Unrest in Sweden

In 2009, Sweden experienced a wave of urban unrest concentrated in areas with large foreign-born populations. This episode was seen by many as reflecting a trend towards increased ethnically based residential segregation, in line with scholarly literatures that correlate inequality and rising segregation with increases in unrest or rebellion. In this paper, we analyze the empirical connection between ethnic residential segregation and episodes of urban unrest in Sweden. Unrest is measured by the number of car burnings reported to police between 2002 and 2009. We find a positive and statistically significant link between residential segregation and car burnings at the scale of municipalities and metropolitan districts. Unrest/rebellion is also correlated with high proportion of young adults and social welfare assistance.

Swedish economic growth and education since 1800

The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, it builds and makes use of long-run data from Sweden on formal education that have never been used to date. Second, it provides a quantitative application of recent theoretical work on the link between demographic changes and economic growth through their effect on education. It concludes that changes in longevity may account for as much as 20% of the observed rise in education over the period from 1800-2000 via a horizon effect, but have little impact on income growth over the period. On the contrary, changes in population density and composition are central, mainly thanks to their effect on productivity. Most income growth over this period would not have materialized if demographic variables had stayed constant since 1800.

Contextual effects on educational attainment in individualised, scalable neighbourhoods: : Differences across gender and social class

This paper analyses whether a multi-scale representation of geographical context based on statistical aggregates computed for individualised neighbourhoods can lead to improved estimates of neighbourhood effect. Our study group consists of individuals born in 1980 that have lived in Sweden since 1995 and we analyse the effect of neighbourhood context at age 15 on educational outcome at age 30 controlling for parental background. A new piece of software, Equipop, was used to compute the socio-economic composition of neighbourhoods centred on individual residential locations and ranging in scale from including the nearest 12 to the nearest 25,600 neighbours. Our results indicate that context measures based on fixed geographical sub-divisions can lead to an underestimation of neighbourhood effects. A multi-scalar representation of geographical context also makes it easier to estimate how neighbourhood effects vary across different demographic groups. This indicates that scale-sensitive measures of geographical context could help to re-invigorate the neighbourhood effects literature.

Composite Geographical Context and School Choice Attitudes in Sweden: A Study Based on Individually Defined, Scalable Neighborhoods

This article contributes both to the expanding literature on the effect of school choice and to the literature focusing on how to measure and conceptualize neighborhood effects. It uses a novel approach to the measurement of geographical context to analyze neighborhood influences on school choice attitudes among Swedish parents. Data on attitudes come from a survey of 3,749 families with children in upper primary school. Geographical context is measured using multi-scalar contextual factors based on socioeconomic indicators for individually defined, bespoke neighborhoods that incorporate from 12 to 12,800 people. The results show that parental motives for choosing schools in Sweden are strongly influenced by the social and ethnic composition of their own and their adjacent neighborhoods. Contrary to most other studies, we find effects of socioeconomic context stronger than the effects of the parents’ own social and ethnic background. Thus, parents living in academic, high-income areas put little stress on attending an assigned school, close-to-home schools, or stating that the municipality has influenced their decision. Furthermore, these attitudes become even stronger if nearby neighborhoods are dominated by visible minorities and disadvantaged groups. Supported by Sampsons ideas of coordinated perceptions among inhabitants in the same neighborhoods, we explain these surprisingly strong contextual effects with the idea that school choice motives are especially sensitive to neighbors’ ideas and easily influenced as measured preferences in a survey.