Abstract: An extensive literature documents that immigration flows frequently trigger native backlash, often reflected in heightened support for far-right parties. Yet, the mechanisms driving this response remain unclear, whether rooted in economic competition or cultural threat. Because these channels operate locally and through daily contact, identifying them requires granular data that are typically scarce. This paper examines how the reception of refugees affects local public education, crime, and ultimately voting behavior, exploiting detailed within-city data and plausibly exogenous variation from the quasi-random location of refugee shelters. Using a differences-in-differences strategy, I find that refugee shelters had no impact on crime or congestion in local public schools. However, they boosted natives' support for far-right candidates and reduced votes for the incumbent. Effects are largely driven by shelters hosting culturally diverse refugees comprising different indigenous ethnicities. Using UN reports data, locals' exposure to vulnerability - children outside of school, child labor, and homelessness - can be behind the results. Together, the results reveal that cultural perceptions can dominate economic channels in shaping local political responses to migration, and that aggregated data can miss essential nuances in locals' attitudes towards migrants.
Funding: UC Davis College of Letters & Sciences Dean's Graduate Summer Support Award and UC Davis Global Affairs Grad Grants.
Presentations: 2025 ASSA Annual Conference; 2025 European Economic Association; 2025 All-California Labor Economics Conference; 2024 CEMIR Junior Economist Workshop; 9th Understanding Voluntary and Forced Migration Conference; 2024 Institute for Humane Studies (IHS) Immigration Papers Workshop
Working papers:
The Impact of Placement Exams on Refugee Children's School Enrollment (with Gabriel Koraicho - Stanford)
Abstract: Between 2010 and 2024, the number of displaced children worldwide nearly tripled, reaching almost 50 million. When enrolling displaced children, schools can face different challenges: absence of school documents, language differences, and prolonged gaps in education. While placement exams can help to assess students’ pre-enrollment knowledge and inform grade assignment, they may also work as an extra barrier to accessing education. This paper studies the effects of introducing mandatory placement exams prior to school enrollment for Venezuelan refugee children in Northern Brazil. We explore a triple difference framework using the policy's geographic implementation and its targeted age range (8 to 14). Using national administrative enrollment data, we find that the policy has reduced school enrollment of around 1,000 refugee children between 2020 and 2024. Importantly, according to local government administrative data, the main challenge was not that refugee families failed to register their children on the exam’s waiting list, but rather in the after-registration logistics, such as lengthy processing times and contacting families to inform the exam’s date and time.
Funding: UC Davis Global Affairs Grad Grants and UC Davis Economic Dept. Research Award 2023 and 2024
Abstract: We study how transit-country visa restrictions reshape international mobility, highlighting the trade-offs they create between reducing irregular migration and sustaining international travel. In 2021, Mexico reinstated a tourist visa requirement for Brazilians, a nationality that was simultaneously a relevant source of irregular migration to the United States and international tourists to Mexico. Using administrative data and a difference-in-differences design, we find that the policy reduced Brazilian encounters at the U.S.–Mexico border by more than 75 percent and that the remaining crossings became more concentrated in riskier border sections with higher mortality rates. At the same time, the policy decreased Brazilian tourist arrivals to Mexico by nearly 40 percent. Even after accounting for the fact that transit migrants previously entered Mexico as "fake tourists'', the impact on "legitimate'' tourism remains of a similar magnitude. These findings show that transit-country visa policies can substantially curb irregular migration to final destination countries, but their effectiveness is weaker (by around 30 p.p.) among less risk-averse (male and young) individuals. Moreover, visas impose significant costs for the transit country by sharply reducing mobility and tourism.
Funding: Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University (grant no. IHS019318)
Presentations: 2025 Institute for Humane Studies (IHS) Immigration Papers Workshop
Work in Progress:
Benefits on the Bench: Workfare, Mental Health, and the Role of the Team (with Remy Beauregard - UC Davis) - Slides
Abstract: Recent studies have found large positive effects of working compared to pure cash transfers on various measures of mental health for labor demand-constrained populations. We hypothesize that some such benefits could stem from belonging to and training with a team even if one is not ultimately selected to work, which we term as “being on the bench”. This study proposes a novel field experiment to investigate the effects of being placed on the bench by a randomized employment lottery for forcibly displaced Venezuelan migrants in Roraima, a Brazilian border state. This population is understood to have both high unemployment and job-seeking as well as poor mental health, making them both appropriate and necessary to study. As we expect these effects to operate through alignment with the meaningfulness or mission of work being trained for, we introduce variation in the meaningfulness of tasks offered. Similar to previous studies, we also include a cash transfer treatment arm and a pure control for comparison.
Presentations: Advances with Field Experiments 2025 Conference.
Impact of a Multi-level Intervention on Social Cohesion among Refugee and Host Communities in Uganda (with Susan Awor, CEGA fellow) - Slides
Abstract: Using data from 4,561 households in refugee-hosting districts of Uganda, we examine the relationship between a livelihood support intervention and social cohesion. The intervention was non-randomized and targeted toward vulnerable households through a participatory wealth ranking approach. The “poorest of the poor” category received cash for labor, while the “active poor” category received loans or grants. We hypothesize that livelihood support reduces competition over scarce resources and improves social relations within communities. The results show that participation in the intervention is associated with reduced land-related conflict. Moreover, conflict dynamics differ by household characteristics, with female-headed households and those with more school-age children more likely to report conflict. Residing in refugee settlements is associated with higher levels of land and general conflict. These findings contribute to the growing literature on interventions for peaceful coexistence among refugees and hosts, highlighting the role of targeted livelihood support.
Presentations: Development Lunch UC Berkeley (2025) and Working Group in African Political Economy (WGAPE) Plenary Meeting (2025)
Managing the Refugee Shock: Evidence on Educational Outcomes from Northern Brazil (with Gabriel Koraicho - Stanford)
Abstract: This paper examines how the arrival of school-age Venezuelan refugees affected local students’ educational outcomes in Boa Vista, Brazil. The city became the epicenter of Venezuelan migration, with the share of Venezuelan students rising from nearly 0\% in 2016 to 20\% in 2024. Using administrative data covering all public schools from 2010 to 2024, we construct a panel of schools and students. Estimating at the school level 2SLS with distance to a refugee shelter as an instrument, we find a null impact of Venezuelan enrollment on Brazilian students' retention, dropout, or change of school. Results are confirmed using within-school cross-grade comparisons from the student-level panel to estimate peer effects. By creating new classrooms and hiring teachers, the municipality kept class sizes and student–teacher ratios stable, which may explain the observed effects.
Presentations: Lemman Center at Stanford University (2024); UC Davis Global Migration Center (2023)