Elaheh Fatemipour

Research

Working Papers

• The Cultural Premium and Attitudes to Immigration (Job Market Paper) (with Priyama Majumdar) [pdf]

Immigrants from culturally distant countries often face stronger public opposition. Can greater economic contribution overcome this disadvantage? And can information about shared values reduce the contribution required? We answer these questions in a survey experiment with UK-born adults. We describe cultural differences across countries through prevailing attitudes towards gender roles, religion and democracy. Using income as a proxy for economic contribution, we estimate the cultural premium: the additional annual income a distant-origin immigrant must earn to receive the same support for permanent residence as a comparable close-origin immigrant. When the immigrant’s personal view is unknown, the premium averages £23,000 relative to a close-origin immigrant earning £40,000. Yet learning that the immigrant shares the prevailing view in the UK reduces the premium substantially, to £6,500. Without personal information, respondents tend to expect the immigrant to hold the view prevalent in the country of origin. Higher income can compensate for the disadvantage associated with origin, but only at a substantial premium and without necessarily alleviating cultural concerns. Integration policies that encourage shared values, alongside efforts to communicate existing similarities, may address these concerns more directly than selection based on economic contribution alone.

• Government by Discussion: Deliberation, Media, and Policy-Making (with Priyama Majumdar)

This paper examines whether oral, televised deliberation in Parliament is reflected in subsequent policy content. We study Question Hour in the Indian Parliament, where an institutional feature of the daily schedule quasi-randomly determines which members' questions receive oral discussion on the floor and which receive only a written reply, creating variation in televised deliberation that is plausibly unrelated to a question's content. We assemble a new fifteen-year dataset (2009-2024) that tracks every question and links it to subsequent bills, committee recommendations, parliamentary activity, and national newspaper coverage. Issues raised in questions debated on the floor are more closely reflected in the bills that are introduced, the recommendations made by committees, and the government's implementation of those recommendations than otherwise similar issues handled only in writing. Oral questions also attract greater public attention, and terrorist attacks abroad that crowd questions out of the news cycle provide suggestive evidence that press coverage helps carry these issues into law. Such coverage amplifies attention to a question's existing content, while the floor exchange, which exists only for oral questions, produces new statements and proposals; the traces of these exchanges in later bills suggest that the discussion supplies content and not only visibility.

Work in Progress

• Gender Targeting in Public Sector Hiring: Evidence from Iran

Publications

• Reproducibility and Robustness of Economics and Political Science Research (with Abel Brodeur and 344 other co-authors; Nature, 2026)

• Accept or reject a ride? This is the problem (with Seyed Ali Madanizadeh and Hosein Joshaghani; Journal of Economic Studies, 2023)

Teaching

Teaching at Warwick

EC226 Econometrics 1, Term 1, 2025–26: Graduate Teaching Assistant. Mean evaluation: 4.55/5.0.

EC350 Behavioural Insights and Applications in Economics, Term 2, 2023–24: Graduate Teaching Assistant. Mean evaluation: 4.63/5.0.

EC345 Behavioural Economics: Theory and Applications, Term 1, 2022–23: Graduate Teaching Assistant. Mean evaluation: 4.63/5.0.

EC131 Economics for Business, Term 2, 2025–26: Graduate Teaching Assistant. Mean evaluation: 4.9/5.0.

Teaching recognition: Department of Economics GTA Teaching Excellence Prize, 2022, 2023, 2034, 2025; Warwick Awards for Teaching Excellence nominee, 2026.