Elaheh Fatemipour

Research

Working Papers

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

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In this paper, we quantify how natives trade off immigrants' cultural and economic characteristics and investigate what drives this trade-off. We define the cultural premium as the additional income an immigrant from a culturally distant country of origin must earn to receive equal native support for permanent residence relative to an otherwise comparable immigrant from a culturally close origin. We estimate this premium using a survey experiment with a representative sample of UK-born adults. Cultural distance is measured using differences in prevailing views on gender roles, religion, and democracy between origin countries and the UK, while income serves as a proxy for economic contribution. When a hypothetical distant-origin immigrant’s personal views are unknown, respondents require them to earn about £23,000 more than a close-origin immigrant earning the UK median income. Describing the distant-origin immigrant’s views as similar to those prevalent in the UK reduces the premium by 71.8%, to £6,500. This contrast indicates that much of the cultural premium reflects the personal values natives infer from origin. Incentivised decisions involving actual immigrants yield similar patterns. Follow-up belief elicitations provide little evidence that higher income signals value similarity or greater integration. These findings suggest that shifting immigration preferences through economic selection alone may require exceptionally high income thresholds, whereas policies that promote cultural integration may address the cultural considerations underlying these preferences more directly.

• 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 Quotas in Public Employment: Occupational Stereotypes and Female Labour Force Participation in Iran (with Negar Ziaieian)

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.