Ethnic Discrimination in Contacts with Public Authorities: A Correspondence Test Among Swedish Municipalities

Ali Ahmed () and Mats Hammarstedt ()
Additional contact information
Ali Ahmed: Department of Management and Engineering, Postal: Linköping University

No 1271, Working Paper Series from Research Institute of Industrial Economics

Abstract: We present a field experiment conducted in order to explore the existence of ethnic discrimination in contact with public authorities. Two fictitious parents, one with a Swedish-sounding name and one with an Arabic-sounding name, sent email inquiries to all Swedish municipalities asking for information about preschool admission for their children. Results show that the parents were treated differently by the municipalities since the individual with the Swedish-sounding name received significantly more responses that answered the question in the inquiry than the individual with the Arabic-sounding name. Also, the individual with the Swedish-sounding name received more warm answers than the individual with the Arabic-sounding name in the sense that the answer from the municipality started with a personal salutation. We conclude that ethnic discrimination is prevalent in public sector contacts and that this discrimination has implications for the integration of immigrants and their children.

Keywords: Discrimination; Subtle discrimination; Authorities; Field experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 H83 J15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 20 pages
Date: 2019-04-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.ifn.se/wfiles/wp/wp1271.pdf Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Ethnic discrimination in contacts with public authorities: a correspondence test among Swedish municipalities (2020)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:iuiwop:1271

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series from Research Institute of Industrial Economics Research Institute of Industrial Economics, Box 55665, SE-102 15 Stockholm, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Elisabeth Gustafsson ().