Research

My research interests include stratification and social inequality, immigrants' economic disadvantage and integration, public policy, and intergroup prejudice and discrimination. My main line of research is concerned with immigrants' disadvantage and integration. In this research, which combines insights from sociology and labor economics, I study how individual and contextual factors influence ethnic inequalities in the labor market. I use large-scale survey datasets (such as the European Union Labour Force Survey) merged with contextual data from different European countries and apply advanced quantitative methods. Some of my recent work investigates the role of public policy in immigrants' economic outcomes. As part of this research, I work on various projects that examine the impact of gender-egalitarian climate and policies supporting the employment of women on gender and ethnic inequalities in Europe. I also study the impact of integration policies (both at the national and regional levels) on the economic outcomes of immigrants with different admission categories in Europe. In other projects, I exploit natural experiments to estimate the causal effects of policy interventions on integration outcomes of recent immigrants in Germany.

My second line of research is concerned with intergroup prejudice and discrimination and factors important for predicting them, in particular, group identification and intergroup contact. In this research, I integrate theories and specific insights from sociology, social psychology, and political sciences. Among other things, I study the relationships between intergroup contact and prejudice and group identification and (support for) intergroup violence.